Sarcasms
by FS
Summary: When Ai leaves London to search for Shinichi Kudo and to investigate her mother's death, she discovers the unbelievable truth of her life... [AN: The plural form of sarcasm is not a typo!]
1. Sarcasm 1: Tempestoso

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm I**

"Tempestoso"

x.

"If you weren't so sarcastic..." he said after a long, embarrassing pause.

It was not the first time I heard that familiar sentence. And it was not the first time I heard that sentence from a guy who had tried to ask me out and who had been rejected by me some minutes ago. Some of them would go away silently, trying to stay cool, only giving me a depressed smile of self-pity; others would leave without trying to hide their disappointment or sadness or misery whatever (depends on the degree of their supposed affection for me); and a few of them – the bold ones – would say something like: "You're in love with the pianist I saw you talking to yesterday at lunch, right? But he's a real idiot... He can't even play well!" or "Why don't you want to give it a try?" or (although that happened only once!): "I don't want to be rude, but... you like girls, do you? Nelly told me about you yesterday evening when..."

Never mind! I never answered any of those questions, anyway. And yes, I knew that Nelly hated me. I didn't mind that either.

Throwing a short sidelong glance at him, I could guess the expression I was wearing on my face as if I was looking into a mirror: Judging from the God-she's-really-the-coldest-girl-on-earth-look on his face, I guessed I was wearing the I'm-bored-to-death-look (which was the most fitting look for what I was feeling when he was with me).

"I think you're afraid," he said solemnly, still walking beside me, "I only don't know what you're afraid of... I've been watching you for very long. You never let any guy come near you because..."

"See you tomorrow at the rehearsal," I said and began to search for my keys.

"What did you say?" He looked at me stupidly.

"I live here," I said to him, opened the door and forced myself to pull my face into something which could be interpreted as a smile. "See you tomorrow."

"Miyano!"

"Hmm?"

"Can I come in? Only for some minutes, we need to talk-"

"I'm sorry I don't have time now. See you tomorrow!" I said and shut the door behind me. Who had ever thought that the best cellist of our school was a wannabe psychiatrist who couldn't accept a simple "No"? Of course I was sarcastic (I'd always been) and not very lovable. And sadly, I didn't have any excuse for this bad character trait except that my mother must have passed it like a gene on to me (except for the fact that she was lovable despite her sarcasm). Maybe there was really something like a sarcasm-gene? The arrogance-gene my father must have passed on to me, because I couldn't remember that I had ever seen my mother behaving arrogantly (and that exactly was the reason why she was lovable and I was not, I'd guess).

"Who is it this time?" the person who I had been thinking of asked. She was standing at the huge window of our small dining room, her arms folded in front of her chest. Once again I was struck by the thought that nobody but her could look so beautiful in that ugly, oversized cardigan! While other girls in my school covered their walls with posters of musicians and movie stars, I would gladly have covered the walls in our apartment with photos of her if I hadn't known that she would have sent me to a mental hospital afterwards.

"Just our first cellist," I answered and dropped my bag onto the floor.

"And? How did he react? He didn't take it very well, I think. Look how he is staggering away. You were not too cruel, I hope..."

"No, I wasn't. I was nice before he tried to cure me from my supposed androphobia. But you're not looking well!"

I frowned at her pale face, red nose, and puffy eyes. She had been suffering from a nasty flu during the past three days, but refused to see a doctor.

"I'm fine," she said and sat down into her armchair. "I'm only a bit tired."

The afternoon light was shining on her pale face, showing clearly the rings around her redden eyes and the perspiration on her skin to me. In only two strides I was at her side, feeling her forehead with my hand.

"You're ill," I said. "You have fever. Wait, I'll call an ambulance."

"No," she shook her head and stood up. "I'm fine. I only have a small flu. Don't worry. I'll go to bed and take a nap now."

"If you're not better afterwards I'll call an ambulance," I said, frowning at her. "I hate ambulances, too. But you should look into the mirror. You look like a ghost."

"Ah, yes," she replied absently and took a book from the shelf. "I think I only need a small nap."

"Mum! You're not going to read now, I hope!"

"I told you I'm fine. I'll read the book to the end and then I'll go to sleep. You can practise here in the meantime. What are you going to play today?"

"Prokofjew, _Sarcasms_," I said, fishing the _Sarcasms_ out of my bag. "But I won't neglect my chemical studies, so don't worry!"

"You don't need to do them only to please me," she said tiredly. "You can concentrate on your piano and practise for your next concert. I've forgotten... When is your next concert?"

"August, Prokofjew's _Sarcasms_, Chopin's _Ballade No._ 1 and Beethoven's _Appassionata_. Bad combination, I know. Nobody on earth survives listening to all the five _Sarcasms_ during one single evening."

"I do," she smiled.

"Yes, you're the only woman on earth who can," I smiled back.

Standing at the door of our dining room with one hand on the doorknob, blinking because the sun was blinding her, she smiled at me for the last time and shut the door behind her.

After she disappeared in our bedroom, I sat down on the piano stool and began to play the first _Sarcasm _slowly, quietly, partly because I didn't want to play tempestoso (with the great dynamic range between fortissimo and pianissimo) before my fingers were warm enough, and partly because I didn't want to disturb my mother in her sleep. The afternoon passed quickly with the first _Sarcasm_ and the octaves at the end of Chopin's first _Ballade_ (I always had problems playing the octaves because of my short fingers). Behind me, the sun was setting, bathing our dining room in a reddish-golden light.

I stopped playing and went to the bedroom, knocked at the door. "Hey," I said cheerfully. "You've already slept for over four hours. You should come out and watch the sunset with me!"

She didn't answer, and I pushed the door open. Illuminated by the light of the setting sun, she was lying under the covers of her bed, looking paler than ever. On the screen of the TV a skinny blonde woman was telling her plump friend about her new diet yogurt. The remote control was lying on the floor.

I didn't need to feel her pulse to know that she was dead. And I didn't really remember what happened afterwards because everything happened automatically, was done mechanically: calling a doctor ("I'm so sorry, but your mother must have had a very weak heart..."), filling the papers, organizing the funeral... I only remembered that nobody came to her cremation a week later, (nobody except for the boys in my school who were in love with me and the girls who were in love with them, the director who was secretly in love with my mother and some of my teachers who took pity on me). Her friends, if she had had any, didn't come. Not even my father, probably a scientist with ambition who had never bothered to marry my mother and who I had never seen in my life, came...

A month after her death (I spent the first month slamming my fingers into the keys of my piano and playing the worst version of Prokofjew's _Sarcasms_ which the world had ever heard), when I looked through her drawers, there was not one single letter, not one single photo except from the photos, the letters and the postcards I had sent her. If my damned father had ever sent her any letters, she must have thrown them away.

You see, love is a fleeting passion which grows cold and forgetful with time, I thought and was reminded of the countless silly boys who had come to me to confess their undying love. Maybe my father was like them, too. A scientist who had met her at college and who was fascinated by her beauty just as the lanky teenagers at my school by mine, who had asked her out, captured her heart with his promises and lies and made love to her and then left her for his career. Loving him was the only mistake she ever made in her life.

The only person I had ever loved was gone. And all she left behind was a quite big sum of money she had saved for my musical or chemical career (I still didn't know whether I wanted to become a musician or a chemist like my parents), a library consisting of hundreds of books (she loved reading), some drawers of clothes, some letters I had written to her... And I almost overlooked the sheet of newspaper at the bottom of her drawer, one of those tabloids that she had never bothered to read (actually, she didn't even watch TV or read any newspaper before I bought the TV on a whim a week ago). It was sheer coincidence that I didn't throw the inconspicuous sheet of paper away before I had read the headline.

**"SHINICHI KUDO WON AGAIN!"** the headline said. They were making a fuss about a Japanese detective (about my age) who had solved a mysterious murder in Tokyo. Judging from the photo, Shinichi Kudo was only a cocky young snob, good-looking in a boyish, rather uninteresting way, and I couldn't imagine why my mother should have been interested in him. But when I looked at the date, I realized that my mother must have bought it the day she died. She must have seen it at one of the newspaper stands on the way to the bank and bought it because something had caught her eye.

What could you have done to distress her so much, I asked the arrogant face which was grinning at me. She was still young, not even forty years old. She was a strong woman. What could you have done to kill her?

I walked to the old TV program of the previous month, which I had put onto the pile of old papers (copies of some scores, love letters addressed to me, advertisements) I wanted to throw away. And I learned that, in the afternoon my mother died, there had been a documentary about the crime in Japan (especially in Tokyo and Osaka) on BBC. They had been interviewing Shinichi Kudo, eighteen years old, private detective, living in Japan, Tokyo, Beika...

Why did I buy that damned TV, anyway? But how should I have known that she had had a weak heart?

x.

The scores of Prokofjew's _Sarcasms_, Chopin's _Ballades_, Mozart's and Beethoven's _Sonatas_, my laptop, some chemical books my mother had given me on my seventeenth birthday (which I had not read yet), three tops, one jacket, three pairs of trousers, three dresses, three pairs of shoes, one sheet of newspaper, one pullover of my mother (to remind me why I was doing this!) and the most important papers... I had always loved packing suitcases. But this time, there was something gloomy about packing my clothes and books into the suitcase. And when I left the apartment, I had the feeling as if – if I returned – I would never be the same again.

On the airport I saw many children with their parents, young and old couples, swarms of girls and boys who were flying into their holiday, men in pressed suits who were looking me up and down before they met my icy gaze. Most people were staring at me when I walked past them, maybe because they were wondering why I was travelling alone, unlike that girl standing in front of me in the queue who was taking the arm of her mother, chatting with her about cosmetics and a don't-know-what's-his-name boyfriend...

"Pretty hair," a ten-year-old boy said to me, grinning brazenly. "Are you travelling alone?" He threw a victorious glance at his small friends who were hiding behind the corner, holding their thumbs up. I almost had the feeling that he was trying to hit on me.

"Thanks," I said rather coldly. I didn't intend to. But coldness had become my second name.

"Ai Haibara, nice name," he remarked, looking at the ticket in my hand.

Ai Haibara... I didn't want to meet Shinichi Kudo under my real name. "Shiho Miyano" might sound familiar to him in case he knew my mother or her family. And "Ai" somehow fitted my recent state of mind. Not love, but unending sorrow. And I didn't wear any other colour except from grey since she died. Even black seemed somehow too brilliant and too dramatic for the dull emptiness inside me. I told the director that I wanted to have a stage name before my debut in August and that I wanted to change my real name to "Ai Haibara". He didn't suspect anything and helped me to go through the formalities changing the name in my passport and on my identity card. (I needed to have my name on my passport changed into Ai Haibara so that Shinichi Kudo wouldn't discover my real name too soon.) Of course I should have done everything alone. But I had never learned to deal with authorities because I had never learned to put on a civil smile when I wished them to go to hell. I must mention my stubborn character which (added to my sarcastic nature) had always caused many troubles.

But I couldn't afford to be stubborn and sarcastic now. I would be sweet and nice and try to befriend myself with Shinichi-the-sleuth – how should I call him, Shinichi-san, Shinichi-sama, Shinichi-chan, Kudo-chan?... (I had never understood why Japanese people couldn't content themselves with a simple Mr. or Mrs.!). I would mime the holidaying Japanese who had spent her whole life in London, who would love to see more of Tokyo and who – by pure chance – had heard so much about the famous Shinichi Kudo that she had become one of his greatest fans. Only the thought of this made me sick. But I would do anything to find out the connection between him and my mother's death... Where did he live? Beika Street? It almost sounded like Baker Street, which made me think of Sherlock Holmes. One could only hope that he was not even half as smart and indifferent towards women as the greatest detective of the detective literature was (or was it Poirot who was the greatest detective?). That would make the whole task a bit tougher for me.

x.x.x.


	2. Sarcasm 2, 1: Allegro rubato

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm II (1)**

"Allegro rubato"

x.

It was raining when I reached Tokyo; and I was soaked to the skin by the time I entered the Grande Suzuki Hotel in Beika (everything here seemed to belong to the Suzukis: Suzuki restaurants, Suzuki pensions, Suzuki hotels, Suzuki cosmetic shops, Suzuki boutiques). Although I had to pay an unreasonably high price for a tiny room at the Grande Suzuki, I planned to stay there for at least one night before I began to search for a room in a different, cheaper hotel. I was too worn out and tired to go anywhere at the moment. After spending twenty hours on planes and airports I only wanted to have a shower and then a nice long sleep.

When I woke up, it was already half past ten p.m, too late to have a decent meal (I tend to get stomachache whenever I eat too much at night) but not too late for a drink and a small snack. Apart from that, sitting alone in the hotel at such an hour seemed unbearable to me. My mother and I had loved to have our tea together at night, spending the hours from ten to one o'clock reading and chatting about our day (actually, I was talking and she was listening to me). After she died, I had begun to take strong sleeping pills and go to bed at nine p.m. Stupidly, I had forgotten to take them with me when I left London. And, worse than that, I had even forgotten to pack my nightwear and underwear in my suitcase. But I was going to solve that problem tomorrow (after all, there must be other shops in Tokyo than those Suzuki boutiques which were certainly just as sinfully expensive as the Grande Suzuki Hotel). The only problem I had tonight was how to find a nice little bar (it's no good sitting in the hotel bar where other guests could come up with the idea of getting into conversation with me) where I could stay until the "dangerous hours" (which could remind me of the tea sessions with my mother) were gone.

Although I am a girl of many talents (I absolutely object to false modesty!), I have no sense of direction at all. Out of fear of getting lost at this hour, I chose the widest street at the left of the first crossroads and decided to go straight forward until I found a café. I was lucky, for only after a ten-minute walk I found a small, very agreeable looking restaurant which would – in case one could trust the information on the small square board at the door – be open until half past one a.m. (which meant it was perfect for me).

Everybody turned their heads when I entered the room, staring at me as if I had walked into an important meeting, their eyes following me on my way from the door to the small table for two where I sat down before they turned their attention to their drinks and meals again. At the table on my left an elegant blonde man between forty and forty-five kept watching me perceptively even when everybody else had looked away, smiled at me when I looked up to meet his gaze.

In the corner of my eyes I could see that the others had not really turned their attention to their meals but were still watching me secretly. An old man who was sitting with his back to me frowned disapprovingly at me when he met my eyes and then turned away, looking annoyed. The woman sitting at his table looked sadly at me as if she pitied me while he was muttering something about "dyed her hair".

Why did I look so strange to them? Was anything wrong with my appearance, my clothes, my hair? There was a middle-aged woman who was whispering something to her friend, a plump man sitting near the bar who had stopped eating when I came in; and there was a young woman who was staring at me as if I was a man from Mars.

The waiter, a shy, lanky young man, smiled nervously at me when I ordered my baguette and my tea. Even he seemed to feel uncomfortable around me. Once or twice I caught him staring in dismay at my hair. And sometimes I could observe that he was looking thoughtfully at me, as if there was something strange about me he couldn't put his finger on.

Come to think of my hair, I had never thought of dyeing it. If Shinichi Kudo really knew my mother, he would grow suspicious as soon as he saw my hair colour. Dye it tomorrow, I said to myself and glared at the dyed-blonde man who was still leering at me.

When I was eating my baguette (the waiter was still watching me with a look on his face as if he were attending a funeral), I felt the eyes of another person on my right watching me attentively. Who is it this time, I thought annoyed. Discreetly directing my gaze from the baguette to the right, I spotted the strawberry blonde at the bar who was frowning at me, her eyes hidden behind dark-coloured glasses. She was an attractive young woman aged between twenty and thirty-five (it was hard to tell her real age because of the thick layer of make-up on her face). And I couldn't understand why nobody was staring at her, because she was wearing black fishnets, an almost transparent black dress with a very daring décolletage and a pair of red T-strap shoes. She herself seemed to have taken some interest in the blonde Casanova, for she was smiling sweetly at him from time to time while he – for a reason I couldn't understand – kept staring at me.

However, it was not her who awoke my interest but the man in the dark corner behind her. He was sitting with his back against me and was the only person who didn't turn and stare at me when I came into the room. There was something familiar about his shoulders and his back. And when I discovered that there was a small mirror behind the bar, I realized that he, too, was watching me through the mirror, a strange expression of alertness and concern in his eyes. I didn't recognize him immediately because he looked so different from the photo on the newspaper. His hair was much longer, jet black, and his eyes were in contrast to it very bright. There was much intelligence in them and genuine friendliness which I had not expected! After seeing his photo in the newspaper, I had imagined him to be an arrogant young teeny, a self-important spoiled brat. But, sitting alone at that table, sipping his coffee silently, he looked charismatic and mature, not in the least like a cocky little sleuth.

Then he lost my admiration at once when I saw how he threw a long glance at the strawberry blonde at the bar. I could swear that he gave her legs and her décolletage special attention before he looked into the mirror again, looking at mine thoughtfully as if he was comparing her curves to my rather slim figure.

Well, he is only a dumb little boy like the rest of the male population at his age, after all, I thought, angry about him for taking away my illusions in just one short moment and at myself for becoming so easily susceptible to him only because of the look in his eyes.

He had finished his coffee and called the waiter to pay his bill. Then he looked through the mirror at me, giving me a meaningful nod, as if he expected me to do the same.

I looked away. But, since I had already finished my meal, I didn't see any reason why I should not call the waiter and pay my bill just like he did. Looking into the mirror again, I saw that he was still looking at me. He stood up slowly and walked to the door, not taking his eyes from me, not minding the other people who were watching us. At the door he stopped and smiled. Then he left the restaurant – looking at me for one more time when he walked past the window next to me, winked at me and disappeared behind the corner.

x.

I must be insane, I thought when I left the restaurant and walked into the direction I had seen him walking. I must be insane, following a man I didn't know anything about. Why did he look at me like that, anyway? But it was unbearable to stay in that restaurant with the eyes of everybody on me. Why didn't I dye my hair before I came here?

Oh great, I thought when I was standing at a small junction (have I already mentioned that I have no sense for direction?). Where had he gone?

There was only a small rustle before he appeared in front of me. He must have been hiding in the small street on my left, waiting for me.

"Hi," he said solemnly. His voice was pleasant, but his tone of voice was not. Nobody was on the streets except for us. The streets were completely empty, which was strange for a big city like Tokyo, especially at this time, in summer. Now that he was standing there under the light of the lantern, he looked all of the sudden cold and dangerous. His eyes were not smiling.

"Hi," I said, trying to give myself an air of nonchalance although I was feeling sick. The premonition of real danger came to me with a strange pain in my stomach and in my chest. And it dawned on me that I was standing in front of a stranger, a man who was much taller and undoubtedly much stronger than I was, in a completely empty street in the middle of the night. I only needed to turn round and run down the street and around the next corner to get back to the restaurant. I could claim to have forgotten something there. But I remembered that I was wearing sandals in which I couldn't run without him catching me within two seconds. However, I doubted that I would have a chance even if I were wearing sneakers, for he had long legs and looked not only thin but athletic, like somebody who spent half of their free time on the track or on the playing field. Undoubtedly he was a fast runner. He was looking at me critically just as I was looking at him. He knew that I wouldn't stand a chance.

My heart leapt when I heard footsteps from behind me in the distance. At least somebody would hear me if I screamed.

Shinichi Kudo looked past me in the direction of the footsteps and frowned.

"Be quiet and come with me," he whispered, put his arm firmly around my waist and pulled me with him to the dark, small street on our left. I opened my mouth to protest. But I couldn't say anything but a very weak "Hey-" before he covered my mouth with his hand. A glance to the left, and I realized in horror that the street led to a dead end.

"Hush," he said, pushing me gently against the wall. "I won't let anybody harm you. Just stay quiet!" He took his hand from my mouth.

Other girls would have grasped the chance to scream. But (I really can't remember that I had ever screamed in my life!) I couldn't make any sound although I was sure that he was going to kill me here and now. I didn't have the strength to free myself from his grasp, and I was so nervous that my knees threatened to give away. He was holding me with both hands, standing so near me that I couldn't see into his face but only hear his heart beating. In contrast to me he had a calm, steady heartbeat, the heartbeat of a killer who wouldn't even bat an eyelid when he was strangling his victim. Looks are deceiving, I thought bitterly. His appearance was one of a friendly, cultivated person. I had even felt something like attraction towards him a few minutes ago.

The footsteps came nearer and stopped for a moment before I could hear them again. Shinichi Kudo sighed.

"OK," he whispered into my ear. "Shut your eyes and giggle! Now!"

He was holding me in a tight embrace, pressing his body against mine. The footsteps had reached our street. I didn't shut my eyes but turned my head to the right where I saw the blonde man standing there, staring at us. Shinichi Kudo's right hand which was hidden from the man was tickling me as if he was trying to make me laugh. And to my astonishment he began to act as if he was kissing my ear and my neck. But his lips didn't touch me. He was only touching my ear playfully with his nose. And he played his task quite convincingly, his left hand tugging impatiently at the straps of my dress and playing with my arm. But since I felt that he wouldn't do anything to me, I began to relax. To my surprise, I began to laugh quietly because his breath was tickling me. How silly, I thought. My paranoia had got the better of me. Shinichi Kudo was not insane but only a very playful guy and above all a real flirt! Everything was partly my fault, too. After my reaction to him in the restaurant one really couldn't blame him for getting the impression that I had a crush on him and wanted him to pick me up. And now we were standing here, pretending as if we were making out in a small side street only to make fun of another man who I didn't know. Kudo might be impertinent, but at least not boring and unimaginative like the guys at my school. And he didn't misuse the situation too much, for he barely touched me.

But the blonde guy was pretty impertinent, too, for he was still standing there, watching us skeptically. I wrapped my arms about Shinichi Kudo's head and pretended to close my eyes. Burying my face into Kudo's chest, I could see in the corner of my eyes how the skeptical expression on the face of the stranger changed into fury and then disappointment. His eyes were glued to my hair with an aggressive, hateful expression which I had never seen on another face before.

And suddenly I understood that this was not just a game. The strawberry blonde woman with the fishnets who was frowning at me, Shinichi Kudo's long hair and his strange behaviour, the way the waiter had been looking at my reddish-brown, almost strawberry blonde hair... "I won't let anybody harm you," Shinichi Kudo said.

"Oh God," I groaned quietly, grabbing Kudo's shoulders with both hands because my knees were giving away. The blonde man didn't move but was still standing at the end of the street, staring at us. I felt more sick than ever and clung to Kudo as if my life depended on him (which was true). It was impossible for me to continue giggling. But Kudo seemed to be used to improvising, because he didn't bat an eyelid at my reaction. He only stopped playing with my ear and wrapped his arm around me.

"Come on," he sighed, loudly enough for my stalker to overhear it. "Let's go to my place. There won't be anybody watching us there!"

x.

"Don't look now," Shinichi Kudo said in a low voice while we were walking slowly through the streets (slowly because it was impossible to walk fast with his arm around my waist). "He is hiding behind the corner. He is still following us. He wants to know my address so that he can attack you when you leave my house tomorrow morning after our alleged one-night stand."

"And what does he want from me?"

"Your hair... I think it's your hair. Both the women he raped and killed last month had reddish hair. I just can't understand why he preferred you to our decoy. He didn't even look at her. Maybe he doesn't like her because of her dress. But probably he likes your hair more because it looks more natural."

"It is natural," I sighed. I knew I should have dyed it!

"Oh," Shinichi Kudo said, pitying me. "That's even worse. It's too dangerous for you to go back to the Grande Suzuki now. We can shake him off behind the next corner and then go to my place."

The Grande Suzuki? Why should I trust him? How could I be sure that he and the blonde Casanova didn't hunt their victims together? If he knew that the guy was a murderer, why didn't he just arrest him or call the police when he noticed that I was in danger? And how on earth could he know that I was staying at the Grande Suzuki? He must have been stalking me since this afternoon... I was getting paranoid.

"Better me than him, don't you think so?"

"What do you mean?"

"Better being murdered by me than by him, right? At least I would never rape you!" he chuckled, making fun of my fear. It seemed as if he could read my thoughts.

"Was it a joke?" I looked up at him. I was stalked by a mad murderer and he was laughing! He looked genuinely amused.

"I only noticed that you didn't trust me. But I promise that I won't touch you. I won't let anybody else touch you either. So, make yourself ready to run when I tell you."

We turned left at the corner.

"Now!" He said, let go of my waist, grabbed my hand and began to race towards the next corner and turned right, dragging me with him. I tried to keep up with him, which was impossible in the sandals I was wearing. To make matters worse, it had started to rain again.

"Argh!" he cried impatiently and threw me over his shoulder with surprising strength. Holding my legs with his left and my shoulders with his right arm, he turned at the next corner at the left and crouched down, hid behind some old containers.

"Uhm," I said, reminding him that I was still hanging over his shoulders.

"Psst," he answered.

I was feeling quite stupid, hanging like that around his neck. Nevertheless I had an overwhelming desire to laugh at the strangeness of our first encounter. But I didn't laugh. Neither did he. A shadow was running past us, stopped and came back, was standing for a moment at the small lane where we were hiding before he left us and ran away, his footsteps growing quieter and quieter until we couldn't hear them anymore.

"You girls and your shoes," Shinichi Kudo sighed, turning his head to the left to throw a disapproving glance at my feet. I wondered if he noticed that my legs were dangling at his ear. I tried to look into his face. But it was impossible to do so (considering the fact that I was still lying around his neck). All I could see were his shirt and his left arm around my calves.

He let go of my shoulders to free his right hand and pulled a tiny mobile phone out of the pocket of his jeans.

"Everything okay here," he said into the phone. "You stay where you are. I'll call you in ten minutes." Then he put his arm on my shoulders again.

He stood up and left the lane to walk down the street in long strides, still carrying me on his shoulders as if he had forgotten me there. The idea came to me that he might really be a mad murderer and that everything was only a scheme of the blonde man and him to deceive me. But, despite myself, I felt safe because I had the feeling that he was not going to harm me. It seemed as if he had saved my life, I thought, looking at the wet street and the soaked shirt he was wearing, and got a strange feeling in my stomach when I recalled the worried expression in his eyes when he looked through the mirror at me. He would have helped me even if it was not his job. But I also knew that I shouldn't take it personally. He would have been concerned about any other person just as he was concerned about me. I guess it was just a character trait of his, something which had nothing to do with me and everything to do with his personality.

x.


	3. Sarcasm 2, 2: Allegro rubato

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm II (2)**

"Allegro rubato"

x.

The huge entrance room in Kudo's villa was a perfect mess. There were piles of books, a few geographical maps, a football, Kendo equipment and clothes, karate clothes (not bad, he had a black belt!), several magnifying glasses, a pair of prism binoculars, and other sundry articles lying on the floor. But, surprisingly, it was neither dirty nor dusty. And the walls were covered by bookshelves which were so well-stocked that they looked as if they were going to break down at any moment.

"You can go upstairs to my bedroom if you like," he said and sat down onto a stair between two geographical maps, pulling his mobile phone out of his pocket. "It's the second room on the left of the corridor. I'll come later."

I was speechless.

"To get changed," he grinned, indicating my soaked dress. "What did you think?"

The only furniture in his vast bedroom was a small bed, a chest of drawers, and a wardrobe with a mirror. I pulled out a drawer because I hoped to find some training suits there. But in the first drawer there were only socks and briefs, and the first thing which caught my eyes was a framed photo of him and a dark-haired girl at his age – they must have been fourteen or fifteen then – sitting next to each other at a table, both holding a book in their hands, she looking surprised into the camera and he looking annoyed as if he had known that somebody would try to take a snap of them. Seized by a sudden, inappropriate curiosity, I picked up the photo and discovered that there were two other framed photos in the drawer, half-hidden under some pairs of socks. In one photo they were standing at a car in front of a theatre or an opera house (I had the feeling as if I had seen it before although I couldn't remember when), talking to a good-looking woman with curly blonde hair (an actress?); and on the other photo they were holding hands in a park, both looking very embarrassed into the camera. The last photo must have been recently taken, for he looked just as old as he was now.

I neither knew why I felt so relieved, as if a load had been taken off my mind, when I discovered that Shinichi Kudo had a girlfriend, nor why I was suddenly reminded of Alec Vineyard, the cellist who firmly believed that I needed his help to overcome my phobia about love letters, photos in heart-shaped frames (or worse: in heart-shaped lockets!), overlong phone calls and exhaustive discussions about the pros and cons of going out with anybody.

By the way he – I didn't mean Alec Vineyard but Shinichi Kudo – had a very good taste. His girlfriend (who, to my relief, was not heart-shaped-framed) looked nice and was very good-looking, with an air of girlish innocence about her which reminded me of Winona Ryder in _The Age of Innocence_, a film which my mother and I had watched together two days before she died. And I smiled at her before I put the photos back into the drawer, reassured that I didn't need to fear any love letters this time.

After changing into one of his red sweat shirts and a pair of black jogging pants – he didn't have any grey piece of clothes – I left the room and descended the stairs where I found him pacing up and down in the entrance room, talking with somebody on his mobile phone.

"... that's why I thought that he would loose his interest in her if he saw me and her-" he stopped abruptly, as if he had realized that he didn't want to tell the person on the phone more about the matter, "well, anyway, I was wrong. He didn't choose her because she looked young and innocent or because he was attracted to her, but only because of her hair colour. Maybe it's her don't-touch-me-air which he hated, too... No, I thought that, too, but now I think that he was not attracted to her... Hmm, that's strange, I know. That's the reason why I believe that we are searching for two different guys, not only one. I think he is the murderer. But he has not raped them. Either the other was his companion, or it was a coincidence... Yes, the next wig should be a bit darker, not too blonde... And the next time don't smile at him... Of course you need a mask. He would recognize you immediately if you... Ah... Oh, I know that it was not your fault... Yes, of course she speaks Japanese fluently. She's at my house at the moment... No, later, not now! She has come down." He threw a glance at me. "Would you like to speak to her?"

The answer must have been a "Yes", because he smiled and gave me his mobile phone.

"It's Mifune-san, our decoy. She would like to talk with you," he said.

"Hello?" I said into the phone. How dumb. I had completely forgotten that I was in Tokyo and not in London. If I were an undercover agent, I would be dead by now. Shinichi Kudo was sitting on a stair, his eyes fixing me with professional interest, irritating me.

"Hello," said a high female voice, repeating my greeting. "Are you alright?" She sounded genuinely concerned about me although we had never met before.

"Yes, perfectly alright," I said in surprise. She must be the strawberry-blonde woman with the fishnets and the transparent black dress I saw in the bar.

"You must have been scared to death. I'm very sorry that we couldn't arrest him because we still don't have a shred of evidence against him. We've been watching that restaurant because the victims had been seen there before they... To be honest, we didn't even suspect him before you came in. But from now on we're going to keep an eye on him. You don't need to worry."

"Ah," I said, meaning that I had understood that she was trying to justify herself to me, but still didn't understand why she felt the need to do so. Moreover, I knew that I did have very good reasons to fear for my life. I had heard enough of Shinichi Kudo's talk with her to understand that my stalker might have a companion, meaning that there was not only one, but two men who wanted to kill me only because they didn't like the colour of my hair.

"You look as if you've never been in Tokyo before. Where did you live before you came here?" she asked me. "Somewhere in England?"

"In England, London. I still live there. I'm only in Tokyo for my holidays," I said, realizing that I didn't even know whether my father had been a Japanese or an English man (or an American, a French man, an Irish man?). My mother had always become depressed whenever I had tried to probe into her past so I had avoided asking her about him. Everything that I knew about him I had guessed and deduced from small remarks which she had accidentally dropped on several occasions, not knowing that I would write them down and collect them.

"London," Mifune-san repeated sadly. She almost sounded as if she had grown so fond of me that she would miss me when I returned to England. "Do you have an English name, too?"

"No," I said. "My name is Ai Haibara."

"Ah, Ai Haibara," she said slowly. "What a beautiful name. Was it the idea of your mother or your father?"

"My mother," I said, telling half a truth. My mother had once remarked that "Ai Haibara" would be the perfect stage name for me because it was a gloomy name. You're always playing the gloomy pieces, she had said. It must have been three years ago, when we were sitting alone in the concert hall of my school. I had been testing the piano for the small concert on the following day, playing Chopin's c-minor Nocturne while she was listening to me silently, her eyes shut and her toes playing with the straps of her sandals which she had taken off because her feet were hurting...

"And what's your mother's name?" Mifune-san asked. "Let me guess: Aika Haibara, Akiko, or Ayako Haibara?"

"Aya," I lied. Her talkativeness began to irritate me. Shinichi Kudo, who was still watching me, frowned as if he knew.

"Ah, Aya," she said. "My husband calls me Aya, too. It's the name of the protagonist of my favourite manga. But Aya..."

And she began to tell me about the terrible things which had happened to the protagonist of her favourite manga series which she had read when she was about my age ("May I ask how old you are?"), and that, because she didn't want to have the same bad luck like Aya, she had always objected to be called "Aya" before she found out that "Aya" was the name of the beloved late grandmother of her husband. "I should have been flattered, shouldn't I?" she laughed. "By the way, do you like manga, too?" But behind her bubbly facade I sensed the born police officer who instinctively probed into me to collect information about my particulars, which she was going to put into a file with the name "reddish-brown-haired girl No. 3, not dead yet".

"No, sorry, I've never read one."

"Oh, you absolutely have to. I'm a bit stressed tomorrow. Work is really piling up. But the day after tomorrow I can drop on Shinichi-kun and bring you some..."

In the meantime, Shinichi Kudo had taken off his wig and was removing his thick black eyebrows now. His real hair was soft, dark brown and short, making his face look softer and much younger than a few minutes ago. The young man who had been running with me through the street was gone, replaced by the smug-looking teeny I had seen in the newspapers.

He signed me to ascend the stairs with him and led me into a vast dining room to the table I had seen on the first photo in his drawer. Leaving me there, he disappeared for a short moment behind a door to come back with a bottle of iced tea.

"Or would you prefer water?" he asked while Mifune-san was prattling on about manga and anime and, she tried to make me believe that she mentioned it only in passing, about an old friend of hers who had moved to London. "Her name was Aya, too," she said. "But unfortunately I've forgotten her surname. She must have got married in the meantime. Hey, maybe your mother..." The smart police officer wanted to make me believe that my mother might have been an old friend of hers who she had lost touch with many years ago. And I wondered why she didn't ask me directly about my particulars instead of beating about the bush.

"No, I really don't think that you know each other," I said, pitying her pathetic attempt, and said to Kudo: "Iced tea is fine, thanks."

"Well, has your mother never been here before?"

"No, never," I said curtly, lying to her again. My mother had been in Tokyo when she was young.

"Oh," she said. Judging from her voice, she had understood that I would like to end our talk. After an "I hope to see you again very soon" and a "You're absolutely safe at Shinichi-kun's house", she put the receiver down. Perhaps she only wanted to be nice to me, I thought in remorse, but my mistrust had got the better of me again.

x.

Both of the victims were women with reddish hair, one of them a Japanese student of chemistry and the other her sister, who worked in a hairdressing salon, and both were raped and strangled six weeks ago in a park, Shinichi Kudo told me. Since the corpses, which had been thrown into a lake, had been discovered too late, the police didn't have much information about the murderer. They had only found some unknown fingerprints, whereupon they compared them with those of the people who had been seen with the women before they died but all to no avail. However, two days ago, they found some small children who remembered having seen the reddish-haired women in a restaurant in Beika the day they were murdered.

"Then the police asked me if I would like to work with them together this time. Usually I don't work on such cases because the police can solve them much better than me. They only need to be patient and wait until the murderer falls into their trap. But yesterday night and tonight I didn't have anything to do. So I thought that I could as well come with them."

"How did you know that it was him?"

"I didn't know it before you came in. I began to suspect him when I saw him smiling at you while he was strangling his napkin under the table."

"Why didn't you arrest him immediately?"

He shook his head.

"I needed to prove my theory," he said. "And I think that he didn't rape the two women although I believe that he killed them. So we still have to search for the second culprit. But you really don't need to worry. Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow at the latest, everything will be over. Until then I would like you to stay here instead of going back to the Grande Suzuki."

"How did you deduce that I'm staying at the Grande Suzuki?"

"It was not deduction," he smiled, "but mere coincidence. On the way to the restaurant I saw you at one of the windows of the Grande Suzuki."

He must have seen me this afternoon at the moment when I shut the window before I went to sleep, I thought and recalled in horror how I must have looked at that time: I had taken a shower, my hair was moist and tousled and I was only wrapped in a small towel. But my room was on the top floor, and I had not thought that anybody on the street would look up just at that moment. At least Shinichi Kudo was polite enough not to go into it any further unlike most of the boys at the conservatoire who would immediately grasp the chance to embarrass me.

In the course of the evening I learned that he was not a real detective but had been "made" detective by the police officers who had a high opinion of him.

"So you see yourself as a consulting detective, as a modern Sherlock Holmes?" In spite of my good intention to be nice and sweet, it came out a bit mockingly.

"Well, at least I have the ambition to become a detective of such a calibre!"

"And? How are your prospects?"

"Not bad. But now we're going to speak about you! What are you going to do after school?"

"Either playing the piano or going to university to study medicine," I answered. "I don't know yet! By the way, I'm not going to school anymore. I've just finished it."

"Just like me."

Now that the excitement and thrill of tonight was gone, my dismal mood of the past weeks had returned. With a twinge of conscience I remembered that I had not come to Tokyo for my holidays but to search for the cause of my mother's heart attack. But, at the same time, I was fully aware that I had impetuously blamed a stranger for my mother's death. What could Shinichi Kudo ever have done to her? I was the only person who was to blame for her death. It was me who had been playing Prokofjew and Chopin in the dining room while she was dying. And even if it was really the interview with Shinichi Kudo which caused her heart attack – maybe they showed some gruesome pictures to her – I was still the person who had not been present when she needed me. And it was me, too, who had bought the TV...

Stop, I told myself. Not again!

"Are you living alone here?" I asked him.

"Yes," he answered.

"And your parents?"

"I'm an orphan."

"Ah," I said unimaginatively, trying to avoid the typical "I am sorry", a meaningless phrase which he must be used to hear. Besides I had not expected him to be an orphan, too. (I considered myself an orphan since my father had never really existed for me.)

"And you?"

"I'm living alone, too."

"Completely alone?" he asked with an irritatingly charming smile.

"Yes," I answered. "But I'm going to move in with my boyfriend next month."

There, see? That's what I meant. Alec Vineyard would say, "What boyfriend, girl? You're always reacting strangely whenever you like anybody."

"Ah," Shinichi Kudo said, looking almost disappointed. "What's his name?"

"Alec," I said because the name of my wannabe shrink was, for a reason I could not name, the only name which occurred to me at that moment.

"Surname?" he asked insistently.

"Vineyard."

"And what is he doing?"

"He is a cellist!"

"A good cellist?"

"One of the best! But you're really curious, you know?"

"I'm a detective. It's my job to be curious. How long have you been going out with each other?"

"You're a real nuisance," I said. "Now that I've told you about my cellist, you can as well tell me about your dark-haired angel! What's her name?" Damn curiosity!

"My dark-haired angel?" he asked in bewilderment. He almost made me believe that he didn't have any girlfriend at all.

"I've seen the photos in your drawer. Well, what's her name?"

"Ah, you mean her," he said (Did he have more than one girlfriend?) and smiled. "Ran."

Pronounced with affection, I observed.

"Surname?"

"Mori! But now it's enough!"

"What is she doing?"

"Teaching karate in Osaka."

"And? How long have you been going out?"

"You're dying to know, huh? Why should I answer your question if you don't answer mine?"

And so everything began. About an hour later, when I was lying in the small bed in the guestroom (where usually Hattori, a friend of his, slept when he came for a visit, Shinichi Kudo told me), I had already brushed his girlfriend and my invented boyfriend aside. Although I knew that he did appeal to me, I also knew that it was only a passing attraction which wouldn't develop into a more serious passion and which – so it seemed – was very convenient to me. He was out of my reach just as I had put myself beyond his. There wouldn't be any embarrassing love declarations but only a small flirt which could be quite amusing and which would distract me for a while from the emptiness of my life.

I remember that I thought of the impressionistic motifs of Prokofjew's second _Sarcasm_ before I fell asleep. I was playing the second _Sarcasm_ in my head while the pictures of that night were flickering through my mind like the fast arpeggios on the keys of the piano. The mirror where I saw him for the first time, the light of the lantern on his face, the starless night and the curtain of rain... I could almost feel his breath at my ear and his arm around my waist and thought sadly that my fascination for him was slowly vanishing, disappearing bit by bit with the dark wig, the night, the rain. Just like the second _Sarcasm_, he seemed unreal, I thought, impressionistic, transient, like a fata morgana, a delightful mirage. A beautiful small motif among the other motifs of the _Sarcasms_, motifs which – in the fifth _Sarcasm_ – sounded like an at first derisive, then subdued, almost tragic laughter.

x.x.x.


	4. Sarcasm 3, 1: Allegro precipitato

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm III (1)**

"Allegro precipitato"

x.

That night I dreamt I was playing the third _Sarcasm_ while Shinichi Kudo and my stalker were chasing each other with kendo sticks around the piano I was playing on. In my dream, I played the third _Sarcasm_ better than ever, and it seemed to me that the repetitions in the right hand sounded like the rapidly beating heart of somebody who was in danger, just as the loud chords almost sounded like shots. I saw myself lying on the roof of a hotel, staring in fascination at the red blood on the white snow... my blood.

I woke up in the middle of the night and could not go back to sleep, no matter how hard I tried. I could not even force myself to practise any piece of music in my head to while away time. The strange pain was not simply emotional. I could feel it in my head, in my stomach, in my toes. It was a bit like the premonition I had before I left my apartment and, at the same time, also a bit like the fear I had when I was standing in front Shinichi Kudo for the first time. My instinct told me that there was something about Kudo which disturbed me, although I could not say what exactly disturbed me so much. Perhaps it disturbed me that he was much more likeable than I had expected him to be.

A panic-stricken voice in my head told me that I should leave his house at once.

But there is still the mad stalker who wants to kill me, I thought. The only place where I felt safe was at Kudo's house. And, although I was mourning my mother's death, I was still sensible enough to know that I was still too young to die. I had always wanted to achieve something extraordinary in my life, for example developing a pill which could cure every kind of illness and pain and keep all people healthy and young until the end of their lives – which was, by the way, one of my most ambitious dreams when I was younger. Or a pill which could raise the dead, I thought. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could develop a pill which brings my mother back? I would rob a bank to get the money for the research, I would work for any underground organization which supports my project... I would do anything to restore her to life.

Stop pondering about impossible things, I told myself: Let's think about the prospect of being murdered by some sick criminals (no matter if they worked alone or in company as Shinichi Kudo suspected) and then decide whether to stay here or not. I must admit that, looking at the matter in that way, it was not a hard choice at all. Falling in love with a nice Sherlock-Holmes-to-be and dying of heartbreak because he already had a lovely girlfriend (who was certainly not half as sarcastic as me) seemed to me a much more appropriate and justifiable end for my story than the first option.

Consequently, I did not leave Kudo's house but stayed in my bed and hoped that my nervous state would be gone by sunrise. My nervousness did leave me after a while and was replaced by another feeling which was almost just as disturbing as my continuous thinking of Kudo: I had the feeling that I had been in this room before, although I could not remember when. Of course I tried to shake off my thoughts by telling myself that it could not be true, as I had never been in Tokyo before. I was still thinking about it until the sun rose and then stopped pondering about it because I heard Shinichi Kudo's steps on the floor. The question whether I had ever been in that room before suddenly did not interest me any more.

x.

It took me some time to figure out that the grumpy-looking stranger in the worn-out pyjama was indeed Shinichi Kudo who must have slept even less than me. He had spent the whole night working on his cases, he told me. Being a consulting detective meant that one had to work until one had solved all of the cases of one's clients as soon as possible and as satisfactory as possible under the circumstances. And there were some personal things which were of interest for him, too, so that he had to stay up all night to research. He had only slept for about two hours and hoped that he could go early to bed tonight.

"Of course only if we have caught your stalker by then," he added. "By the way, what do you always have for breakfast? Ham and eggs or rice soup?"

Rice soup? For breakfast? Usually I did not eat breakfast, since my stomach did not like any kind of food before noon. But I had never tried a rice soup before.

"Rice soup, if you have any."

"I don't," he says. "But Mifune-san has some. She wants to come over at eight and said that she would bring us some rice soup if we like."

"I thought she were busy today," I said, thinking that the nosy police officer seemed to have really taken some interest in me. Perhaps she needed to have another look at my hair so that she could choose the right colour for her wig.

They had changed their plans so that she did not need to play the decoy anymore, he told me. That's why she had a day off. It was not necessary to use a decoy anymore, as he had thought about the matter for one more time and decided that the most important thing was to protect me...

"You mean I should be the decoy," I said. I hated beating about the bush.

"Well, not exactly, technically speaking. But it seemed to me as if he was really fond of you and your hair. It is possible that, now that he has seen you, he won't give up until..."

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"You don't have to do anything. We are going to your hotel together to fetch your suitcase. Then you're staying here with me until everything is over. Until then you can do whatever you want to. I will come with you, in my disguise of yesterday night, of course, so that he won't suspect anything when he sees us together. From time to time I will pretend to leave you alone. Of course I will stay near you, and some police officers, too. We will arrest him when he tries to..."

"To kill me? Will you arrest him before or after he has strangled me?"

"Before, I hope."

"Do your wishes come true?"

"Some of them do," he laughs. "But I told you I won't let anybody harm you. I'll give Mifune-san a call now."

"I'll go into the bathroom," I said. "Can I have a towel?"

"In my bedroom in the drawers. There must be a new toothbrush, too. It's yours if you like."

"Thanks very much."

x.

I do not remember clearly everything what Mifune-san said during the morning. I do not know if things have begun to get blurred in my memory or if I only did not pay enough attention at the things she was talking about. I remember that I was not really interested in her, at least not when I saw her real face for the first time. Her real hair was straight, long and black just like Shinichi Kudo's girlfriend's hair; and she was just as pretty, bubbly and likeable as I expected "Ran" to be, which might have been one of the reasons why I felt a bit left out when Kudo talked to her. The other reason was that she – despite being married and being some years older than he was – obviously looked up to him and was quite attached to him. She and I did not talk so much with each other as I had feared. I had the feeling that I liked her and feared her at the same time and believed that it was the same with her, as she was not nearly so talkative towards me as she was on the phone.

"I wanted to bring you the manga," she said at last, forcing a smile. "But I had completely forgotten that I had lent my manga to the small girl in my neighbourhood. I can-"

"It does not matter," I said, trying to be polite and sweet. "I'm not going to stay for very long in Tokyo."

"By the way, why didn't your mother come with you?" she asked. "Is she holidaying with your father?"

That was, of course, the wrong question.

"No, she has already been in Tokyo before... She didn't like it very much."

"Oh... but for you, it must be lonely to travel alone..." She looked crestfallen. And I had the feeling that she must have expected much more of our meeting than this.

When she left Kudo's house, I went to the balcony of the guestroom and stayed there until the sight of her car vanished from my view. I stayed until I could not see anything of her anymore. And I had the weird feeling that, if I allowed myself to do so, I would immediately begin to cry. I had not recovered from my strange sentimental fit when I felt Shinichi Kudo's arm around my shoulders. He had put on his black wig, but had tied it together to a ponytail.

"Let's go to the Grande Suzuki and fetch your suitcase now," he said. "I don't have a car, only a motorbike. But I think we only need to fetch your most important things. Do you mind driving without a helmet? I'm a very good driver."

x.

In the end it was him who had to drive without a helmet. After I had already climbed onto his bike (I had problems to sit since I was wearing my grey dress), he decided that it was safer if I wore the helmet. Since he was driving, he could react better if anything should happen, he explained.

"Do you have time?" I asked.

"Yes. I've finished everything I was working on last night. Why? Where do you want to go?"

"I would like to have a look at the city," I said. "Do you mind driving me around?"

He did not mind at all. But it was better to drive around after we had fetched my clothes so that I did not need to pay for one more night. I must have seemed quite thoughtless to him. It had always been my mother who had cared about the practical things so that I felt disorganized and lost since she died.

I did not even know how to sit on a motorbike, for example what to do with your...

"I suggest that you hold my waist," he said when he noticed that I was pondering about what to do with my hands. "Remember that we want to make your stalker believe that you had spent the whole night with me."

"He believes that anyway," I said, following his advice. "By the way we don't have to behave that amicably to each other. It could have been a bad night which we had with each other, couldn't it? What fun can a woman have with a guy who is only sitting at his desk, working on his cases for the whole night?"

"Why does it have to be my fault?" he said. "What fun could a m.. h... with a g... wh...mis..."

"What did you say?" I asked. We had stopped in front of a red traffic light. The helmet and the noise around us made it difficult for me to understand him.

"I said that one can't have fun with a girl who mistrusts one and who is so tense that she cannot even shut her eyes and giggle when one wants her to," he said loudly. Can you hear me?"

He was too loud. Everybody was looking into our direction now.

"Yes, I can," I said. "It seems as if you had enjoyed our night just as little as I did. But the good thing about an one-night stand is: You don't have to go through it again. I still wonder why you wanted it at all, after this failure in the dark lane."

Through his rear view mirror I could see that he was flushing and throwing nervous glances at the people around us who were grinning openly.

"The next time I'll wear the helmet," he said when the lights changed to green. "And then we'll see whether you still have the courage to be so bold when there is no helmet hiding you."

x.


	5. Sarcasm 3, 2: Allegro precipitato

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm III (2)**

"Allegro precipitato"

x.

The summer in Tokyo was terribly hot, much hotter than I had imagined, so I was glad to get rid of the helmet when we reached the Grande Suzuki. The receptionists seemed to know Kudo, as they nodded and smiled at him when we entered the hotel.

"You are quite famous in Tokyo," I said.

"Not really," he said. "But I know the Suzukis well. The concierges have seen me at some of the birthday parties."

"Nice people? The Suzukis, I mean."

"Hmm, Sonoko Suzuki is Ran's best friend. Let's just say that she's nice towards Ran. But most of the Suzukis I know are rather spoiled, if you ask me, Ran's friend included. By the way, you have a really small room here. I didn't know that the Grande Suzuki has such small rooms."

"You don't want to know what it costs me."

It took me only a minute to pack my bits and pieces together. In the meantime, he was standing at the window, looking thoughtfully down the street.

"Is there something interesting on the street?" I asked.

"No, nothing," he said and drew the curtains. "But I didn't expect you to have only one suitcase. It's not very small, but not huge either. What about carrying it home before starting our little excursion? Depositing it in one of the lockers of the Grand Suzuki can be quite expensive, you know."

He said "home", I thought. It sounded almost as if we were a cohabiting couple. He took our little role-play quite seriously, carrying my suitcase in one hand and holding my hand with the other. And the weirdest thing was: it seemed entirely natural to me to hold his hand. It felt somewhat comforting.

"I hope that we won't come across any corpses today," he said when we climbed onto his bike. "Is the suitcase too heavy for you?"

"No, it isn't. But why corpses? Do you often come across corpses?"

He always stumbled over corpses, he told me. It was a curse and a blessing at the same time, because he was never out of work.

"I didn't know that you could be so morbid," I remarked.

"Why morbid? Isn't it better if I'm always there to solve the case? There will be corpses whether I'm present or not, anyway."

It seemed as if he had forgotten that he wanted to wear the helmet, because I wore it again on the way "home". After depositing my suitcase in the guestroom, we started off again, driving aimlessly through the crowded streets of Tokyo. (Again I was wearing the helmet.) And, although most of the places were completely unknown to me – which was no wonder since I had never been in Tokyo before – some of them still seemed vaguely familiar. I felt with increasing certainty that I had been in Tokyo before, long ago, when I was still too small to remember clearly. But it was peculiar that my mother had never mentioned it to me.

We stopped after an hour to rest at a bridge which seemed particularly familiar to me. I put on my sunglasses – as the sun was blinding me – and leant against the railing of the bridge, looking into the water where I could see our reflections wavering. The scorching heat was bearable due to the breeze which let the palm trees at the shore underneath us sway gently.

"Nice place," I said.

"Hmm," he answered.

He was lost in thought about something. Perhaps he was thinking of Ran who had been here with him before.

"I wonder why your cellist didn't come with you to Tokyo," he suddenly said.

Alec had to work, I told him. He and the pianist who was accompanying him were on tour in Thailand. It was not really a lie, as Alec and his accompanist were really on tour.

"If I were going to move in with my girlfriend, I would be holidaying with her instead of touring around," he said. And then, a bit mockingly: "Maybe he doesn't love you at all."

"He does," I said, piqued by his attitude towards my made-up-love-affair with my self-proclaimed shrink.

"Really," he said, looking inquiringly at me.

"At least I hope so," I said. "He doesn't belong to the type of guy who would move in with a girl who he doesn't love."

He only smiled in reply and put his arm over my shoulders again, pulling me away from the railing. From the look on his face, I could tell that he didn't believe me. Being a detective, he must have noticed something in my behaviour which contradicted my story. But, instead of using the situation to clear up everything, the idea came to me that I could see it as a challenge: Shiho Miyano's – Ai Haibara's – lying skills versus Shinichi Kudo's powers of observation. Apart from that, it seemed unacceptable to me that I was single whereas he had a girlfriend.

On the way to the place where we had left his bike, I was still thinking about how to trick him into believing me when I felt his arm squeezing my shoulders gently. Looking up, I spotted my stalker, the blonde man from the previous evening, standing on the other side of the bridge with a small camera in his hands, taking photos of the people passing by.

"He has seen us, too," Kudo said, pulling me with him into a café. "He is following us. I'll call the police now. When they come, I'll pretend to leave you alone. You only need to wait for about ten minutes to finish your tea. And then you leave the café, alone. You don't need to worry. I'll be watching you. And the police officers will, too."

x.

As expected, my stalker followed us into the café and sat down at a small table at the window. He ordered a glass of orange juice, a glass of white wine and two portions of Hayashi rice and took out his camera, taking a few photos of the bridge and – pretending that he did it accidentally – a few photos of Kudo and me. Then he stood up and walked in the direction of the toilets.

"A lunch for two," I said. "I hope it's only his companion and not his girlfriend or wife. Besides, what do you think about the photos he has taken of us?"

"I think he will show them his companion," Kudo said. "But we have photos of him, too."

"Do we?"

"My watch," he smiled. "I took some photos of him yesterday evening. But the police have not found any files about him yet."

"You can take photos with your watch?"

"Yes. Some of the Professor's inventions are quite practical, although most of them are only toys, sadly."

"The Professor?"

"Professor Agasa. An old friend of mine."

"Old in the figurative or literal sense?"

"Old in the figurative and literal sense. He is in Osaka with Hattori at the moment." He smiled at me. "If you like, we can visit them when everything is over."

"You want to go to Osaka with me?" I asked, wondering whether he knew that it sounded in my ears like a proposal to spend his holidays with him.

"Only if Alec doesn't object to that, of course," he said, smiling with the faintest trace of irony.

"And if Ran doesn't object to that," I remarked and suddenly remembered that Ran was in Osaka at the moment.

"She would like to see you," he said seriously. And my dream "holidaying with Shinichi Kudo" vanished into thin air. Before my eyes, I saw him sitting at his desk in his crumpled pyjama, the receiver on his ear, talking with Ran about a nice girl who he just met. I think Haibara and the Professor (or Hattori?) would like each other, he was telling her. It would be great if they could meet each other... Perhaps when the case is over? But she is really not my type. You don't need to worry, Ran...

"I would like to meet her, too," I said.

It was not even a lie, because she did interest me. I wanted to know her because I knew that, if I didn't get to see her and to accept that she did exist, my unfortunate infatuation would only grow instead of fading away as I had thought in the night. Then again it was partly his fault as well. He was playing his part of our little charade a bit too well. It was hard to remind myself that he already had a girlfriend and that he was only playing my boyfriend to protect me when he held my hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

The blonde man had returned to his table, but did not touch his Hayashi rice. From time to time he threw a look at the door as if he was expecting somebody. But, for a reason I could not name, I had the feeling that he was only acting and that he was not waiting for anybody at all. It was hard to guess whether Kudo was thinking the same or not although I believed that he was. And it was impossible to ask him, as my stalker would have noticed it. Kudo played his role of the new boyfriend with enthusiasm, chatted with me about random things like Tropical Island, the amusement park that he had often visited when he was small, about a funny English teacher who loved game centres and even about my grey dress which he liked. To make our role-play perfect, he began to flirt with me, to tell me that, among so many things he loved about me, he loved my face and my hair (!) most, and the way how I looked when I was surprised, of course...

"Apropos surprised," I said. "I have to buy some new pieces of underwear. Can you show me a boutique that is not as terribly expensive as those of the Suzukis?"

It seemed as if I had taken him by surprise, as he changed colour and looked at me as if I had said the most indecent thing he had ever heard.

"It's not a joke. I had forgotten to pack my underwear and nightwear into my suitcase. I don't really need any nightwear. But I would like to change my underwear tonight. It's-" I stopped, realizing what I had said about the nightwear. He had noticed it, too, judging by the grin on his face.

"Okay," he said. "We'll go shopping this afternoon. But I have to visit my mother first. The doctor only allows me to see her from two to five. Would you like to come with me, or do you want me to speak to her first?"

He had told me that he was an orphan. Hence that was the signal that the police had arrived. Three people had just come into the café where we were sitting in: a woman and two men. The woman could be Mifune-san with a new mask and a brown wig. The men were completely unknown to me.

"I'll visit her tomorrow if you speak to her this afternoon."

"Of course I will," he smiled. "I won't be long. See you at half-past-five here again. What are you going to do in the meantime? Are you going to the library?"

"Good idea."

"Bye."

He made for the door which opened in front of him just when he was about to push it open, and a reddish-blonde guy with a brown cello case on his back walked in, looking very familiar to me.

"Oh God," I said. He was the last person I expected to see.

"Oh, Shiho," my self-proclaimed shrink exclaimed (in English, of course). "What are you doing here?"

Kudo looked back at me in surprise.

At least Alec didn't say "Miyano", I thought in relief. (Unlike our first cellist, who is Japanese, Alec is an English-American and does not even call our teachers by surname.)

"It's Ai now," I corrected him.

"Oh well, Ai," Alec sighed. "I will never get accustomed to that." He leant his beloved cello carefully against the wall and flopped into the chair where Kudo had been sitting. "The guy at the door is staring at us," he said in a low voice. "Do you know him?"

Kudo was looking at me as if he expected me to say something.

Hence I said: "Yes, I do. Alec, this is Shinichi Kudo. Shinichi, uh, Kudo, this is Alec Vineyard, my..."

"Ah, your cellist, I see," Kudo said in English so that Alec could understand him, returned to our table, and, because his chair was occupied by Alec, took a chair from the table of my stalker. "May I?" he asked and, without waiting for an answer of the blonde guy, took the chair. It seemed that I was right and that Kudo, too, doubted that my stalker was expecting anybody.

"And you are her... cousin?" Alec asked, looking from Kudo to me.

"No, he is..."

"Something similar to that," Kudo said, sitting down. "And you are the boyfriend I have heard so much about?"

Oh great, I thought. I had not expected Kudo to be so bold. Almost everybody in the café was looking at us, expecting to witness an amusing encounter between the steady boyfriend and the new affair of the same girl. My stalker, too, was watching us with interest. Even the three police officers in disguise were staring at Alec who only smiled and, to my dismay, didn't even bat an eyelid when he said "Yes, I am," and took my hand.

The point was: Alec was quite accustomed to be mistaken for my boyfriend or my brother whenever people saw us together. We had hit it off immediately when we met, as he was a nice guy who was more interested in his cello than in any girls and therefore only wanted a friendly relationship without expecting any romantic feelings from me. One could almost call what we had "friendship", although we barely knew each other and never visited each other at home due to our full schedules. He was always practising on his cello or touring around, and I was always practising on the piano or sitting in the library. We did not even have time to play with each other since he had his own accompanist and I had my first cellist (who, by the way, was a wannabe-psychiatrist as well) who I had to accompany. But Alec often gave me a call. And, from time to time, so once or even twice a month, we would go somewhere to drink a cup of coffee with each other or to have lunch. And, during the three years he knew me, he had helped me to get out of some embarrassing situations and had played my boyfriend several times. In his eyes, it must have seemed as if Kudo was one of the guys who had a crush on me and who I was not interested in.

"Really," Kudo said, looking at me. "To be honest, I thought that you were only joking when you told me about him." He gazed at Alec, confused. "You're really her boyfriend?"

"I've already told you that I am. But you're not really her cousin, I would guess," Alec remarked.

"No," I said, "he's-"

"Her new lover," said a middle-aged woman who was sitting at the table next to us in broken English. She flashed me a wicked grin. "It serves you right, girl, betraying your boyfriend like that," she said in Japanese.

Alec blinked.

"Sorry, what did she say?" he asked me. "He is your new-"

"The poor woman is drunk," Kudo said quietly. "She doesn't know what she says."

"Did you hear that? I think he said I was drunk," the woman said to her friend, who was sitting at the same table. "It's a shame that the young people have become so..."

A disaster. Alec threw some inquiring glances at Kudo and me; I had to repeat everything what the woman had said (because her English was too bad and because he didn't understand Japanese) and to convince him that she was drunk (which she was not); and, in the meantime, Kudo kept gazing gloomily at me as if he were the long-time boyfriend whom I had betrayed.

Meanwhile, the stalker of mine had received a call, listened to somebody on his mobile phone, nodded, said "Okay" and, after finishing his call, signed to the waiter that he wanted to pay.

"Ah, well, now that we have solved our little misunderstanding," Alec said at last, "what about having lunch together? I've not eaten anything today yet."

"Alright," Kudo said. "Shiho," he put a small emphasis on my real name and pronounced it like Alec did, "and I have not eaten anything either, apart from the rice soup this morning."

"You've had rice soup for breakfast? But how come you two had breakfast together?"

My stalker had paid and left the café. One of the police officers stood up and left the café as well. But Kudo didn't move. He did not even react when I nudged his leg under the table with my foot. He was telling Alec a nice story about us being old childhood friends who had been together at kindergarten and who had met each other again by chance "yesterday night".

"And you stayed for the whole night at his house?" Alec asked me, looking shocked.

"Yes, she did," Kudo said, smirking at me, and signed to the waiter to come.

The woman who had accused me of betraying Alec stood up from her table and walked in the direction of the ladies. Just as we were ordering our meals, she came running out of the ladies, screaming that she had seen a corpse there.

The victim was not a strawberry blonde this time, but a young woman with black hair. She was lying in front of the sink and, luckily, she was not dead although somebody had obviously tried to strangle her, as evidenced by the red marks around her neck. The culprit had not only tied her and put a piece of cloth into her mouth, but had even broken both of her legs. However, her heart was still beating, Kudo said, removing the pieces of cloth from her mouth, wrists and ankles. She was going to survive.

"But we still need an ambulance," he told the female police officer in disguise who was, as I had guessed, Mifune-san. Alec, his cello and I were standing outside the ladies, looking at Kudo over the head of the peering people.

"That's strange," Alec said, putting a protective arm (the arm which was not holding his cello!) around my shoulders. "I think I've seen her before. The day before yesterday, she was in the same plane as me. But I'm sure that, the last time I saw her, her hair was reddish blonde, a bit like yours and mine."

x.


	6. Sarcasm 3, 3: Allegro precipitato

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm III (3)**

"Allegro precipitato"

x.

The culprit couldn't have been one of the guests, Kudo told Mifune-san. He (Kudo was sure that the culprit was a "he") was an athletic, dark man with broad shoulders and hairy arms. He had removed the metal shutters of the window of the ladies and must have been waiting outside the café until she went to the ladies to refresh herself and to check her make-up. Without the shutters, the window was big enough for him to climb in. And he only needed to anaesthetize her with a bit of chloroform before he entered the room. There were curtains at the window near the basin, and the victim, who had taken off her glasses to wash her face, probably didn't notice him before he leant forward, covered her face with a handkerchief which was soaked with chloroform and then climbed in and drew the curtains. He must have been wearing a uniform, for example the uniform of a plumber, so that...

Alec (plus cello) and I went to another corner of the café, because we did not want to belong to the group of onlookers gaping at the scene. Although both of us were glad that the woman was going to survive, neither of us was interested in the case. The police and the ambulance finally came. Mifune-san was driving with them to accompany the victim to the hospital whereas the third of the police officers in disguise stayed with Kudo in the café. He was a thin, tall, lanky man who reminded me a bit of the waiter of the restaurant where I had met Kudo for the first time, although I was not sure whether he was really the waiter or not. From time to time he smiled at me, giving me a look as if we had already met.

"Do you know him?" Alec asked.

"I met him yesterday night in the same restaurant where I met Kudo," I explained and told him about the previous evening, about my stalker and Mifune-san.

"So that was the reason why you stayed at his place last night," Alec said. "But you still have to tell me why you came to Tokyo. You didn't mention anything the last time we talked."

"It was just an impulsive decision to come here. And then you were on tour. But you didn't tell me why you're in Tokyo either. I thought you were in Korea and Thailand."

It was an impulsive decision, too, he told me. When he was small, a cousin of his father, an actress, had told him so much about Japan that he decided to go for a few days to Tokyo when his tour was over. The pianist accompanying him had returned to London.

"I thought of you and tried to call you from Bangkok. But nobody answered the phone."

I had not told Alec anything about my mother's death. And, since it seemed that he had not heard about it yet, I decided not to tell him. The change in location had helped me to live with the fact that she was not with me anymore. The sun was shining, the third reddish-blonde woman (well, ex-reddish-blonde, to put it correctly) had survived, and there was Shinichi Kudo who would protect me. I had the feeling that my attitude towards life was changing. I began to accept that life was precious because it was so short and could end at any time. I was ready to play the decoy to stop the murders. But I was not ready to deal with Alec's sympathy yet.

"Where are you staying?" I asked Alec.

"Last night, I stayed at the Grande Suzuki, not at the one where you were, but at the one in Shibuya. But it was too expensive, so I left my bag in one of their lockers and moved out. I have to search for a new hotel now. Even the lockers in the Grande Suzuki are too expensive for me."

"You can stay at Mifune-san's place," Kudo, who had overheard our conversation, said.

"Well..." said Alec, hesitant to accept the offer.

"She's married and has a small daughter," Kudo said. "But I don't think her husband would object to-"

"No, thank you," said Alec. "It's really nice of them. But I think I'd rather go to a hotel. I prefer to be alone."

Kudo threw a thoughtful glance at me. And Alec finally understood what both Kudo and I had been thinking of. Being my boyfriend, it would have been natural if Alec wanted me to stay with him instead of staying at Kudo's place. And Kudo, being concerned about my safety, wanted me to stay at his place instead of walking around with Alec, who did not know the city. But Alec's "I prefer to be alone" had made him suspicious of our relationship to each other.

"You don't need to worry. Ai-" (I was grateful that Alec hadn't forgotten that he had to call me "Ai") "-is safe with me," Alec said. "And your culprit doesn't attack male reddish-blondes, does he?"

An elegant solution. Pretending that he had expected me to come with him. But his elegant solution also implied that I would really spend my holidays with him instead of with Kudo.

"He has not attacked any up to now. But you can never know how the brain of such a psychopath works. I think it would be safer if you both stay at my place until everything is over," Kudo said and, without waiting for Alec's answer, went away to inspect the window.

"He really has a soft spot for you, huh?" Alec remarked. "I'm almost a bit sorry for him."

"He only wants me to play the decoy," I said.

"I don't think that's a good idea. You're not the right girl for that job. But we can talk about that later. I feel like I could eat a horse, although it might seem a bit irreverent at the moment to have lunch here."

"I'm hungry, too. Let's go somewhere to have lunch."

"What about Kudo? He has not eaten anything either, except from the rice soup, if my memory serves me correctly."

"I don't think that he wants to eat anything," I said, indicating Kudo who was crouching on the floor. "But we can buy something for him, too."

Since Kudo was occupied with his investigations, I told a police officer that we would like to leave the café and would come back later, after we had eaten something in another bar. As we had been sitting at Kudo's table, we didn't witness anything of importance which Kudo did not notice as well. And we were staying at Kudo's place, anyway. They could take down our particulars and ask us their questions later.

x.

On the way to the shopping centre on the other side of the bridge, Alec told me all about his tour (about the critic who had called him the Casals of our time, about the blackout he had when he was playing the Bach suites so that he had to improvise, about the Mendelssohn trio which they performed with the Korean violinist who had insistently tried to ask him out) while I was listening to him silently, trying to get rid of the feeling that I had been walking over this bridge many years ago, trying to listen to somebody else talking to me while I was pondering my own thoughts, just like now.

"What's up, Shiho?"

"Sorry. But I have the feeling that I've been in Tokyo before... when I was small."

"And? Don't you know it for sure? What about asking your mother?"

I shook my head.

"I think there is a reason why she's never wanted to tell me anything about Tokyo," I said.

"Your father?"

"Hmm."

He smiled and patted my shoulder.

"Come on. We're holidaying. The weather is great. Stop thinking of sad things, Shiho."

I blinked.

"What did you say?"

"Stop thinking of sad things, I said. It doesn't matter whether you've been here or not and why your mother has never told you that you've been here in Tokyo. Think of our lunch."

Stop thinking of sad things. There was a faint memory of somebody, a tall, young man with dark hair... It could have been on this bridge or on another one like this. I was small and had to look up to see his face although I was able to walk on my own. But he had not pronounced it like Alec, who had grown up in London after the divorce of his parents. He had an-

"By the way Kudo's English is really good, isn't it?" Alec said. "I could understand him well despite his American accent."

He had an American accent.

"Kudo's English teacher was an American," I said. "He told me that she was a funny one who loved game centres. I have the feeling that he liked her very much."

"You mean he only did his homework well to please her?"

"Maybe he had. But there is a pizzeria. What about going in?"

The pizzeria only looked inviting from the distance. Alec opened the glass door and then, frowning at the terrible background music, the hordes of people (a tourist party who had just entered the pizzeria through the second glass door) and the smell of defective air conditioning, shut it again.

"What's stronger, Shiho? Your hunger or your sense of culture?"

Although both of us were hungry, the idea of eating the pizzas in the middle of the crowd didn't appeal to either of us. So I suggested that I buy the pizzas for us so that we could eat them on the bridge or on one of the benches on the banks of the river. Alec and his cello could wait for me outside the pizzeria in the meantime.

"I really don't like the idea to leave you alone, now that I know that there is a mad man trying to kill you."

"In a crowded pizzeria with two glass doors and a glass wall? I won't go to the ladies, I promise."

"He is mad. Maybe he'll try to kill you in a crowded pizzeria. By the way you have a nervous stomach. Don't forget that. If he doesn't kill you, your stomach will kill you afterwards."

"But I'm too hungry to wait any longer. He might be mad, but he's still so sane and cautious that he won't try to kill me in front of so many witnesses. And I promise to shout for you when I feel that somebody is trying to strangle me."

"Very funny," Alec said. "I'll come with you."

"No, I don't want to see you and your bulky cello in this pizzeria. You can watch me through the glass door. Just stay here and keep your eyes open."

My last argument was convincing to him. So I went into the pizzeria and waited in the queue to buy the pizzas while he stayed at the glass door, watching me.

x.

Ironically, it was the glass doors and the glass wall which helped them catch me. Standing in the queue, I discovered through the glass wall that, behind the pizzeria, there was a small boutique which looked nice and attractive and was, judging from the prices of the underwear I could see on the mannequins in the shop window, not very expensive. I could spare Kudo the embarrassing task of going shopping with me and buy some pieces of underwear now.

After buying the pizzas and drinks, I – being too lazy to fight my way through the crowd between us – signed through the glass door to Alec that I was going to leave the pizzeria through the other door to go to the boutique. He opened the door where he had been standing at to come towards me. But, thinking of the tourist party between him and me, I waved and signed to him to go around the pizzeria (so that he didn't have to fight his way through the crowd) and wait for me at the door of the boutique. Then I hurried to the boutique to buy some pieces of underwear before Alec came. Since Kudo seemed to be embarrassed when I mentioned my underwear, I expected that Alec would be embarrassed, too.

I had just chosen some pants and a bra I wanted to try on and was on my way to the changing cubicle when I saw in the huge mirror of the shop that my stalker had just come through the door. The only girl in the shop (luckily not a strawberry blonde but a dark-haired woman) had left the room to talk to somebody on the phone. Fearing that he would try to kill her, too, I did not dare to call for help but let go of the underwear and left the boutique quickly through the second door. Judging from the sound of two doorbells, I deduced that my stalker had left the boutique through the door he had come in.

I couldn't go around the boutique because I expected my stalker to be there, waiting for me. I did not want to shout for Alec, who was probably waiting for me in front of the boutique, because I couldn't imagine that he, with his bulky cello case on his back, could be of much help to me against the blonde man who was older and certainly had experience on his side. Besides, I'm sure that I wouldn't have been able to shout for him even if I had wanted to.

I was standing on the long, narrow street on the backside of the shopping centre, trying to get back to the bridge when the blonde man, who had been going around the boutique, reappeared again. I turned round to run into the opposite direction and, in my panic, ran into a dustman who was carrying a huge plastic sack.

"Watch out," he said, his voice deep and friendly.

He was a middle-aged, very strong-looking man, much stronger than the blonde guy, I noticed in relief. But there was a faint smell about him which I didn't like.

"Sorry," I said, my voice barely audible since I'd always had problems speaking whenever I was nervous. Looking over my shoulders, I noticed that the blonde guy had stopped running. But, to my surprise, he did not look annoyed or disappointed. He was smiling, raising a hand to wave at me. The dustman, who had let go of his bag, was holding my wrist in a tight grip. The blonde stalker was walking towards us, still smirking. I could feel the dustman pulling me with him to the other end of the street.

"Hush," he said quietly. "I'm going to help you."

Just like Kudo, I thought.

But Kudo didn't smell of chloroform, I realized in dismay, suddenly reminded of Kudo's theory about the culprit. The last things I noticed were that he was pulling something out of the pocket of his jacket and that the blonde man, who had joined him, was holding the plastic sack. There was nobody in the side street, only a van which probably belonged to them. According to my sense of direction, I would meet Alec, who was waiting for me in front of the boutique, if I managed to run to the left end of the side street and then turned left again.

I couldn't think clearly, but knew that I wouldn't be able to escape once they had managed to get me into the van. I turned my head to bite into the black-haired guy's arm. And then everything went black.

Everything that I saw afterwards was either parts of a dream or long-forgotten childhood memories. I saw myself walking over the bridge again, next to me a tall, black-haired man who was looking down at me. I saw my mother sitting in front of a computer, typing something while he was standing at the door, watching her from behind. When the scene changed again, I saw her standing in Shinichi Kudo's guestroom, looking out of the window at the white snow.

Faintly, through a thick fog, I saw the face of a small, black-haired boy smiling at me. I saw a young black-haired woman and a small black-haired girl with huge, innocent blue eyes. There were the sad eyes of the black-haired man again. I saw snow, smoke and the red gleams of cigarette butts in the darkness. And then there were the faces of the people I had met in Tokyo: Shinichi Kudo, Ran Mori, Mifune-san, the police officers, my stalker, the dustman, whirling around in my head to the end of the third _Sarcasm_ as if they wanted to remind me of something which I had successfully banished from my mind.

x.x.x.


	7. Sarcasm 4, 1: Smanioso

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm IV (1)**

"Smanioso"

x.

After the dramatic ending of the third _Sarcasm_, I turned the volume of the CD-player down because I doubted that my nerves could tolerate the deafening beginning of the fourth _Sarcasm_, the _Smanioso_. But some seconds later I turned the volume up again, and wondered who the pianist was who could play the "smanioso" so well, who had not only played "smanioso" as if it meant the same as agitated, but grasped the second meaning and knew that, underneath the agitation, there was a hidden feeling of longing, a hopeless yearning for something which was out of your reach.

"Why didn't you tell me the truth?" I asked when the door opened and Shinichi Kudo stepped in. In the darkness, I could only see his silhouette against the window, and thought that he had never seemed so mature and distant to me, so silent and lifeless, as if he were a ghost of somebody who had died long ago.

"Because you didn't want me to," he answered, his voice, though familiar, was huskier and deeper than I had expected. "You still don't want to know..."

"I do want to know. What exactly happened between her and you?"

He shook his head and took a step towards me, kneeled down to look into my eyes.

"Nothing. But you still don't want to remember me," he said sadly; and at that moment I realized that it was not Kudo who I was talking to. However, I knew this man. I only didn't recognize his voice because we were speaking Japanese. I wondered why I could mistake him for Kudo, as he did not look like Kudo at all. There must be something about him which reminded me of Kudo, I thought and, at the same time, realized that I was only dreaming. The man kneeling in front of me was the dark man who had been walking with me over the bridge.

x.

The sound of my grumbling stomach was the first to greet me when I woke up, although I was not sure whether it was really my grumbling stomach or only a trick my imagination played on me. Inwardly cursing my hunger and the dizzy feeling in my head, I found myself lying on a small bed in the corner of a square room. The last rays of sunlight filtered roughly through the Venetian blinds of the window near the door on my left. There was another window with Venetian blinds above my head through which I could hear a cello playing softly _The Last Rose of Summer_.

When I decided to sit up and look out of the window to see who the cello player was, I became aware that my legs and arms were tied to the sides of the bed, whereupon my memory of the recent happenings came back with a vengeance. I pulled slightly at the ropes, changed my positions for a few times and finally admitted to myself that I didn't have any chance. I would only hurt myself if I tried to escape.

I had brought it upon myself, anyway, I thought. New underwear had seemed to me to be more important than my own safety. There was nothing I could do now except hope that Kudo would find me or that I would get a chance to escape. It was strange that I was still alive, though, I thought. How long had I been unconscious?

But I didn't have more time to ponder my situation, for the door next to the window had opened. A man in black was limping into the room. Then he closed the door, hobbled over, and stopped in front of my bed, resting his weight on the elaborate walking stick in his right hand.

"You're awake," he said in a monotonous voice. "How are you? Thirsty, hungry? You must be hungry. I'll tell them to bring you a soup."

"Where am I?" I asked, mildly surprised by his behaviour. But, as I knew that looks and manners were deceiving, his civilized behaviour towards me didn't give me much hope. The ropes around my wrists and ankles were the proof of his cruelty.

"You're in my apartment," he said in English. "Nothing will happen to you as long as you don't try to escape. I'll tell them to remove the ropes now. If you try to escape, we will tie you again, and won't untie you a second time. Do you understand?"

Without waiting for my answer, he signed for the black-haired guy, who I had mistaken for a dustman, to come in and to remove the ropes. The false dustman left the room immediately afterwards, and the blonde guy came in, carrying a tray with tea and a soup which he put onto the small table at my bed.

"I must warn you that both of them are staying in the living room," the man with the walking stick told me, his voice still monotonous – as if he had just learnt his monologue before I came. "So don't try to tempt fate. You know what happened to the other girls."

Despite my growing hunger, I didn't touch the soup. I was sitting on the bed, watching him silently as he stood at the window near the door, watching in turn the sunset through the Venetian blinds. He was an inconspicuous man in his mid-40s, sturdy and slightly overweight, with a rosy face, grey eyes and light brown hair. In contrast to his healthy appearance, his movements were slow and awkward and the expression on his face painful in a strange way. In contrast to the other men, he looked shy and youthful. There were freckles on his face.

A European, I thought, but not of English origin, judging from his accent. For a few minutes, none of us said anything. Except of the sounds from the living room – somebody typing and watching TV or listening to the radio – I could only hear the cello outside of the window playing _The Last Rose of Summer_, softly but insistently, so beautifully that it hurt to listen to the music without seeing the musician. However, I didn't dare to look through the Venetian blinds at the window because I feared that my movement would draw the attention of my kidnapper to the cello player. It seemed as if a crowd had formed on the street, as I heard applause and people shouting for more. Cellists who didn't make any scratching sounds were rare even in professional circles, I thought, much less on the streets.

"I knew that you would come," the stranger said at last, breaking the silence. "I knew that you wouldn't want other women to suffer because of you." His voice was resonating with victory. But when he turned to look at me, his face still had the painful expression which I had noticed immediately when he limped into the room. He tilted his head and beheld me as if I were a painting.

"You haven't changed at all," he said. "You are still as beautiful as the last time I saw you. I suppose you've had a great time. And you didn't ever think of me, that I was pining away in that prison. Not even for one second did you think of me. Right?"

I realized that he couldn't see me very well. I should have known it when I saw the way he held his head and pushed his chin forward, how he moved and walked. Perhaps he couldn't hear very well either, judging from the awkward way he moved. Perhaps he didn't hear the cello on the street and therefore couldn't notice that the player was too skilful to be a street musician.

"Maybe you have really forgotten me," the stranger continued his rambling. "I didn't mean anything to you, did I? You gave me false hopes and then snubbed me when I proposed to you. But I told you I wouldn't ever give up. I told you I would wait for you until you came to me." He leaned forward and touched my face curiously as if he had to convince himself that I was real. Knowing that my life depended on his mood, I forced myself not to back away even when I felt a flush creeping up my neck as the anger about his impertinence became almost irrepressible. I was not going to let anybody rape me so easily, I thought. I wouldn't let him do more than that. He moved awkwardly and was probably not very fit; if I reacted fast, I could whack him into unconsciousness with his own walking stick. But what would happen then? I was not so naive as to think that I had any chance against the two men who were waiting in the dining room.

However, he didn't do anything except touch my cheek and peer at me with his dull grey eyes. After a while he sat down onto the bed and smiled at me.

"We will be together for eternity," he whispered. "'I feel that you will love me some day. Do you know that I tried to save you when they wanted to execute you? But you didn't know... Why didn't you give me a chance when I asked you to? Did you think that I was not good enough for you?"

I didn't answer and let him ramble on about his love for me. He seemed to have had a huge crush on a girl with reddish hair who must have looked quite similar to me and who had driven him insane by rejecting him. I shuddered at the thought that I might have driven some guys insane too, and that, at the age of forty, those guys would begin to rape and kill reddish-brown-haired girls just because they had a grudge against me.

You must give me the drug, he was saying. So that we can live with each other for eternity. You were their best scientist. They said that if you couldn't do it, nobody in the world could. They thought that you didn't succeed. But you have succeeded. Fifteen years have elapsed and you are still so young...

"I'm not..." I began, trying to think of a way to tell him that, firstly, I was not the girl who he wanted me to be, and, secondly, I didn't know what he was talking about.

But he cut me short by taking both of my hands and bringing them to his cheeks.

"Some day, you will agree to marry me," he said. "I won't force you to do anything you don't want to. I will wait for you even if it takes you a hundred years to fall in love with me. Don't ever dare to go away. I'd find you no matter where you are hiding. I'd kill every reddish-haired woman until you're the only reddish-haired woman left in the whole world."

He was gazing intensely into my eyes. And it dawned on me that, despite his bad eyes, he must be able to see me quite clearly unless he was blind. His nose was almost touching mine.

"I've been waiting for so many years for you," he said thoughtfully. "Some day, you will marry me voluntarily. 'Black' suits you well, don't you think so, Miyano?"

Finally, it dawned on me that he didn't mistake me for just any reddish-haired woman but for my own mother, who looked exactly like me when she was young.

"My name is Ai Haibara," I said, feeling numb and cold.

"If you prefer Ai Haibara, I'll call you Ai Haibara. Names don't mean anything to me."

So that was the reason why she had taught me to be cautious and to mistrust people. Before my eyes, I saw her sitting in front of her computer, in front of her desk, examining test tubes, reading the copies she had made and the notes she had taken when she was in the library, laughing about my remark that such an ingenious scientist like her shouldn't waste her talents on the small projects of the university... I often wondered why she had left Tokyo for good. But the idea had never occurred to me that she might have left Tokyo to forget a mad man who had been stalking her.

But I couldn't believe that this man was really my father...

"But there is somebody," I began, summoning up the courage to look into his lifeless eyes. "There is somebody else who means more to-"

As I had already expected, he lost his patience and grabbed me by my shoulders, shaking me.

"He is dead," he hissed. "Just accept it, Miyano. He will never come back to you. Not even you can raise the dead."

One can only hope that the police will come soon, I thought. Black had flown into a temper after my little experiment. Speaking of experiments, I remembered that I had been joking about inventing a drug which kept people young for eternity and that my mother told me that anybody who tried to mess with the Stream of Time would be punished.

Come on, I wouldn't be able to make it even if I wanted to, I said, whereupon she told me that I would be able to develop it if I wanted to, and that it was important that I never tried to develop it, as such a drug would be a danger to the world.

Then I'm going to make a drug which can raise the dead, I said, whereupon she didn't say anything in reply.

The cello on the street had begun to play Bach. As I had already guessed, it was really Alec who was playing, since the Allemande, despite the perfect technique and warm tone of the cellist, just didn't sound right. Alec used to forget parts of the score whenever he was nervous, so he had to improvise. And I recognized his style of improvisation, the arpeggios he liked.

Sitting on that bed, listening to Black's rambling and Alec's cello, it occurred to me that I didn't know my mother at all. From Black's rambling I learned that she had been the top scientist of a secret Organization and had somehow managed to escape. Now that he had found me, he wanted to take me to the Organization so that I could continue her project and develop a pill which kept them young for eternity. He thought that I was my mother who was still young because she took her miraculous drug. Also, it seemed as if my mother had had a friend (boyfriend?) who had helped her to escape from the Organization and who had been shot.

Was the name of the man Kudo, by any chance, I wondered.

I'm an orphan, too, said Shinichi Kudo. And what had once seemed to be a connection between Kudo and me had become the impenetrable wall between us. How would he react to the news that his father had been killed because of my mother, and that there might have been an affair between them?

The name of the man was certainly not Kudo, I thought. There were no such coincidences.

But why not, a voice in my head asked.

And perhaps this creature was my father. A dangerous lunatic, a mad man who had killed several girls to blackmail my mother into coming back to him... Did they say anything about the murders in the documentary about Shinichi Kudo and the growing crime rate in Tokyo? Was it Shinichi Kudo's similarity to his father – her saviour – which caught my mother's attention and made her buy the newspaper? Did the news about the murders cause her heart attack because she knew the murderer's identity and understood that he killed the reddish-haired girls because of her?

The cello had stopped playing Bach and suddenly began to play Prokofjew's fourth _Sarcasm_. And I knew that Alec wanted to warn me of something, as the fourth Sarcasm didn't belong to a cellist's repertoire. I could see a small red point on Black's stomach before the glass of the window broke, before Black sank down next to me and the sounds of steps, breaking chairs and muffled shots disturbed the homely atmosphere of the apartment. Some seconds later the door of the bedroom flew open; and Shinichi Kudo was standing there, staring at Black and me. Another man stepped into the room, threw a short look at Kudo, raised his hand to greet me and left the room immediately again.

"Are you alright?" Kudo asked breathlessly.

"I'm okay," I said.

He bit on his lower lip and frowned at the ropes on the floor, the crumpled sheets on the bed, Black who was lying unconsciously next to me. It was silent except for the muffled talks from the dining room. The cello had stopped playing.

"Are you really okay?" he asked insistently, his face as white as snow.

"I'm terribly hungry," I said.

He looked at me strangely, extended his hand and pulled me towards him.

"I thought I came too late," he said. "I-"

"Come on, nothing happened," I said nervously.

He didn't say anything but only put his free arm gently on my shoulder. Just when I thought that he was going to embrace me, the door flew open again, and Alec ran into the room, clad in an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt which smelled awfully and a pair of sandals which looked as if he had not changed them for the past twenty years. His hair was so dusty that it was impossible to distinguish his hair-colour.

"You silly girl," he said and pulled me into his arms. "I thought I would never see you again."

"You smell terrible, Alec," I remarked because I didn't know what to say. His shoulders were trembling. It seemed as if I had really given him the shock of his life.

"I exchanged my clothes with a guy," he said, still holding me tight. "Otherwise nobody would have believed that I was a street musician."

"It was him who called me," Kudo said quietly. "He saw how they pulled you into the van and immediately followed them."

"Thank you," I said, directing it to both Alec and Kudo. But when I looked up from Alec's shoulder, I saw that Kudo had already left the room.

x.


	8. Sarcasm 4, 2: Smanioso

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm IV (2)**

"Smanioso"

x.

The encounter with Black and the revelation about my mother's past had neither put me in a state of shock nor produced any lingering after-effects, but only left an unreal, somewhat surreal impression in my mind owing to the drowsy summer afternoon and Alec's cello playing in the background. I felt like I had made a cameo appearance in a big-budget thriller and had, now that the last run-through was over, devoted my attention to the next movie, a rather melancholic story of an ill-fated romance, in which I was cast in the leading role.

The only problem that existed for me was how to sound Kudo out about his father without revealing my mother's past to him. And, being too tired to design an effective scheme, I decided to ponder that little problem later in bed when I was alone. It didn't take me much effort to prevent myself from thinking of Black's connection to my mother either. No sooner had they carried Black out of the room than I had already dismissed the hypothesis that Black was my father as purely speculative and therefore unacceptable. The fact that Black called my mother by her surname was already conclusive evidence that there had never been an intimate relationship between them. I pushed the horrible thought that he might have raped her out of my mind because, despite his malicious character and his unfortunate obsession for her, Black didn't seem to be a man who would rape the woman who he loved. There was a certain romantic side in his twisted character which, or so I surmised, would have prevented him from such an act.

Despite knowing that Black, no matter how pathetic he was, was a dangerous and sadistic murderer who had frightened my mother to death, I didn't feel much except hunger and relief at my rescue. My strong sense of self-preservation prevented me from pondering grave matters on an empty stomach. And I was grateful for this prosaic streak in my character, which had been my saviour during the many times my sarcasm failed to protect me from the twisted humour of the thing people called Fate.

Just when I wondered what Kudo was doing in the living room and decided to search for him, he appeared at the door with a pile of clothes and a pair of sneakers in his arms.

"I won't let you drive home with us wearing those smelly clothes," Kudo said to Alec, tossing the clothes towards him. "These should be sufficient for the time being. We're taking fingerprints in the living room at the moment, so just stay here until we're finished." Then he left the room again without looking at me.

Carefully avoiding the tiny pieces of broken glass, I leant against the windowsill and gazed through the Venetian blinds while Alec got changed. The sun had gone down, stripping the world of the vivid colours of the day. In the growing darkness, the world outside looked so much more agreeable to me than in the glaring light of the sun.

Even before my mother's death, I had always loved the shiny black and white keys of the piano, which seemed so simple and yet so elegant to me. But it was not until I became Ai Haibara that I also began to appreciate the monochrome landscapes of the night, the shadows, the sharp black outlines and the manifold shades of grey.

Colours reminded me now of the innumerable possibilities in life, which I could never think about without a vague sense of fear, partly because I had been so happy in the world of my own, undisturbed by emotional turmoil and confusion, that I wished it would have stayed like that for ever, and partly because, unlike most girls at my age, I despised adventures and drastic changes (which were equivalent to upheavals to me).

"What are you thinking of?" Alec asked, joining me at the windowsill. He had a habit of asking that question all the time.

"Nothing in particular. I only thought it was ironic that the sniper wouldn't have been able to shoot him if he had not been a hopelessly romantic murderer who wanted to watch the sunset through the Venetian blinds…"

"Do you pity him?"

"No, of course not. I only thought that his cruelty was equivalent to his tendency towards kitsch. He wanted to set the scene for a romance. And this is what he got instead. Isn't it terribly funny?"

"Oh yes, terribly funny. To be honest, it seems to me that your stomach is just as empty as mine," Alec said after a moment of skeptical silence. "That's why you get such strange thoughts. But your idea that cruelty and the tendency to kitsch are equivalent to each other is interesting. I think both are stored in the same dark corner of the human mind."

"You're being poetic, Alec," I remarked. "It's not like you."

"It's not like you to be morbid either, no matter how sarcastic you can get at times. What happened between you and him?"

"Nothing. He touched my cheek, that's all. As I said, there was a streak of romance in his depraved character. He didn't do anything to me."

"But he didn't treat the other girls with the same courtesy as he treated you."

"He bound me to the bed and you say that he treated me with courtesy?"

"You know exactly what I wanted to say, Shiho. I think you know why he spared you the same fate as the other girls. The police will ask you the same question as soon as they're done inspecting this apartment. So why don't you want to tell me first?"

I had to admit that there was a certain logic in his argument, for there was no doubt that the police was going to ask me to give an account of what happened before they came. So I gave Alec a detailed report of the happenings and only omitted a few details about my mother's past connection to Black. I told Alec that I reminded Black of a woman he loved and who had rejected him, which was the reason he let his assassins kill other reddish-haired women but had not harmed a hair on my head. It took me a lot of effort to conceal the rest of the story from Alec, as my self-proclaimed shrink had a forceful personality and always managed to give me the feeling that telling him my deepest secrets might be the wisest decision I could make.

"It was an incredible piece of luck that you survived," he said. "Such dumb luck won't happen a second time. The next time somebody stalks you, we'll buy the pizza together. And I promise I won't take my eyes off you for a minute."

"Deal. But now that I've told you my story, you must tell me yours. How did you discover that they had kidnapped me?"

"That was really not difficult. I-"

He was interrupted by the sound of the door (which Kudo had left slightly ajar) flying open with such a force that it was slammed against the wall. Within the blink of an eye, I found myself in a suffocating grip again, with the only difference being that these arms didn't belong to Alec but to Mifune-san, who was sobbing into my shoulders, stammering that she was going to kill the men who had kidnapped me and that she was so immensely relieved that I was still alive.

A man had entered the bedroom and was standing at the door, fidgeting with his brown hat. Despite his youthful face (he was certainly not older than thirty), he already had a receding hairline and was getting stout. I remembered having seen him somewhere and needed a while to figure out that he had been in both the restaurant where I met Kudo for the first time and in the café where we found the last victim of Black and his companions. He was the second of the police officers in disguise and the one who had left the café shortly after my blonde stalker left it. It must have been him who helped Alec to find me and to contact Kudo.

"I think we're almost done with the living room. We can continue with the bedroom now," he said, obviously embarrassed by the sentimental scene.

"Let's go to the living room now," Mifune-san said, wiping her tears away.

I should have been touched by her concern for my safety, especially because her tears seemed real to me. But I realized that I couldn't feel anything except hunger, exhaustion and the desire to curl myself up on the couch in the living room – or even in the bed which was still stained by Black's blood! – and succumb to the sweet oblivion of sleep at once.

x.

The living room in Black's apartment (but was it really his apartment?) was just as simply furnished as the bedroom. However, it was also just as cosy as the bedroom and so elegant despite its modesty that I instantly felt at home in it. One wall of the living room was completely taken up by a balcony and a huge window with Venetian blinds, while framed monochrome posters of various cities decorated the other walls. Although Black had shown that he did have an exquisite taste when he fell in love with my mother, his pathetic tendency towards kitsch had made me think that he had a bad taste when women were not concerned.

I wandered from one poster to the other in a kind of distracted daze until I was aware of somebody watching me. He was a tall, black-haired man with sad eyes, whose angular face suddenly seemed so familiar to me that I was sure we had already met before. At second glance, I recognized the third police officer in disguise, who had been in the café this afternoon and who reminded me of the waiter of the previous night. I did not recognize him immediately because he had removed his false moustache and his wig – or exchanged his wig for another wig after leaving the café. Kudo and his colleagues (I considered the police officers Kudo's colleagues since he treated them with the easy familiarity of an equal) seemed to love disguises and masks.

Anyway, the ex-waiter was not very talkative, for he only flashed me a faint smile without saying anything. Mifune-san, who more than made up for her colleague's reticence, went into detail about her anguish when she learned that I had been kidnapped, and demanded that Alec gave us a detailed eye-witness account… not now, because we were going to leave the apartment soon, but later, on the way to "Shinichi-kun's" place, and because…

"But I still have to search for a hotel room," Alec protested.

"No, you don't. You can stay at my place."

"You won't find a room at this hour, anyway," the ex-waiter remarked. It appeared that he could speak after all.

"I won't let you and Haibara go anywhere before the case is officially closed," said Kudo, who had stuck his head out of the bedroom door to frown at Alec. "You can either spend the time until then at my place or in this apartment under observation," he added coldly.

The unexpected harshness in Kudo's behaviour startled me. A short sidelong glance at Alec showed me that he wouldn't let Kudo treat him like a wayward child. I expected him to explode at any moment, as I knew his impulsive, choleric character, which sometimes showed itself in heavy (hyper-British!) sarcasm much worse than mine.

However, his anger about Kudo's bossy attitude seemed to have woken him up from the dream (or rather nightmare) which my disappearance had put him into. He stared into space, wrinkled his forehead as if he was pondering a grave matter, then looked about himself and suddenly flew into a panic.

"My cello!" he exclaimed, his voice at least an octave higher than usual. "Where is my cello?"

It was impossible for him to be hyper-British when it came to his cello.

"I don't know. Where did you leave it?" It was incomprehensible to me how he could have forgotten where his cello was.

"I leant her against the shelf," he said, pointing at the empty shelf next to the bedroom door.

There was no cello at the shelf.

"She's not there," he said intelligently. For him, his cello had always been a "she". He treated her as other men treated their lovers and spent an hour every day polishing her (I mean: "it"!). I would never forgive myself if it suffered any harm because of me.

"Are you sure that you leant it against the shelf?"

"Yes, I did lean her against the shelf. I'm absolutely sure."

The ex-waiter smiled.

"Well," Mifune-san said.

"You don't need to worry about 'her'," I heard Kudo's voice saying and shifted my gaze from Mifune-san to him. He was leaning against the doorframe now, watching Alec and me with a sparkle of amusement in his eyes.

"I had it brought to my place," he said matter-of-factly. "And it seems to me you will voluntarily come with us after all."

x.


	9. Sarcasm 4, 3: Smanioso

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm IV (3)**

"Smanioso"

x.

We didn't have to stay in the living room for long. Deciding that the police could do without him when it came to taking fingerprints in the bedroom, Kudo told us to get into Mifune-san's car and drive "home" with him. Alec could have a shower there, and then we could go somewhere to celebrate my successful rescue. Mifune-san and the two police officers in disguise, who had been watching the stalker this afternoon, would not drive "home" with us as planned (as there was not enough place for all of us in the car), but would join us later in the restaurant, as would a certain "Megure-keibu" – whoever he was – and a few other police officers whose names I did not remember.

I loved these last-minute improvisations.

Resisting the urge to tell Kudo that I was completely exhausted, that I hated gatherings of more than three people, and that I would prefer to go to bed as soon as possible, I agreed (it's not that he had really given me a chance to say "No", anyway) and tried to appease myself with the thought that the police officers were nice and wouldn't get on my nerves. Moreover, they had just saved me from a life-long suffering in Black's company. I should learn to be nicer to people to whom I owed so much more than just a debt of gratitude.

It was pitch black on the streets when we left the apartment, as I could see through the window of the floor. And the thought came to me that I might have been less calm and collected if I had been kidnapped at night. It was hard enough to fight against your natural fear of getting hurt (or even killed) by your enemies. But it was almost impossible to fight against your own imagination, to chase away the ghosts which only exist in your mind. In the darkness, Black's face would have looked eerie instead of pathetic to me.

Speaking of Black...

"Did any of them survive?" I asked Kudo when we left the apartment and descended the stairs.

"All of them," he answered. "They are only wounded, not dead."

"What a pity," remarked Alec.

We had reached the ground floor, and Kudo opened the door for me. Seized by a sudden curiosity, I stopped at the entrance of the building to search for the nameplate of the apartment.

"There is no nameplate," Kudo said with an impatient movement of his arm and grabbed my hand to pull me away. Either he had forgotten that Alec was my "boyfriend", or he had really seen through our little game and was now absolutely sure that we were only acting…

"But maybe there is a nameplate on the postbox," I said, inwardly hoping that he would not let go of me although I knew that I should draw my hand away if I wanted to keep up our charade.

"I've already looked at it. There was no nameplate on the postbox either. The police would have noticed it immediately when they came. Let's drive home." He let go of my hand, wrapped his arm around my shoulders and led me towards the car which was waiting for us in front of the gate.

x.

I must admit that I was blind with love – as I realized afterwards – and completely incapable of thinking clearly when it came to him. Without Alec's interference, it would never have occurred to me that Kudo was hiding something from me just as I was hiding my mother's past from him and that his "impulsive" embrace could have served a certain purpose. Taking his display of affection for real, I almost yielded to the sudden impulse to lean my head against his shoulder – had actually just yielded to it! – when he abruptly turned round to Alec and asked "What are you doing?"

"I want to have a look at the nameplates on the backdoor," I heard Alec's voice saying. I turned just in time to see him waving at me and running through the side street behind us towards the pitch-black courtyard on the other side of the building.

"There's no nameplate for that apartment," Kudo sighed, but did not make an attempt to follow him. He opened the door of the car for me to get in before he walked around the car and seated himself on the driver's seat.

"Do you have a driving licence?" I asked. I had heard somewhere that Japanese youths often borrowed the cars of their acquaintances although they didn't have a driving license. And, although I believed that Kudo was sensible enough to stay away from the steering wheel if he couldn't drive, I still wanted to know whether he had a licence or not. I had always believed that knowledge was the key to power; and I felt safer when I knew what situation I had to deal with.

He turned his face towards me and smiled absently, surprising me with the melancholic expression in his eyes. It seemed to me that he was just as tired as me, exhausted from wrestling with his own demons for too long. In the dim light, he reminded me more than ever of the man I had seen in my dreams. But then he switched on the light in the car and was immediately transformed back to my saviour from the previous night, the mysterious stranger with the serious eyes and the beautiful long hair. I felt the sudden desire to stroke his strands and thought that it was a pity that his hair was only a wig.

Why had I never noticed that I liked men with long hair?

"Of course I do," he said with a sigh, answering my question when I had almost forgotten it. "She wouldn't have given me the keys if I didn't!"

"She is so fond of you that she would give you the keys to her car even if you didn't have a driving licence. What does her husband think about it?"

I had chosen a frivolous tone to prevent us from falling into an abyss because I felt that it was ridiculous to fall into an abyss without having a plausible reason. But my voice sounded hollow and my lightheartedness forced.

"No, she wouldn't. She is very law-abiding. And her husband is a bit like Vineyard. He is not very jealous of me," he remarked with a hint of irony.

"So you tried to make Alec jealous?" I asked, stifling a yawn. Now that I was sitting, I was getting so sleepy that it was hard for me to prevent my eyelids from drooping.

"No! I only noticed that he is not particularly jealous, that's all. Otherwise he wouldn't have left you with me to search for a nonexistent nameplate."

Removing his wigs and artificial brows, he changed back into Shinichi Kudo, the peculiar consulting detective who was a complete enigma to me... I did not feel like making a retort to his remark, as I had fallen in a state between sleeping and waking and was too lazy to open my mouth to speak. I did not care about our little game anymore. Probably he knew as well as me that Alec and I were just friends and that Alec's romantic feelings for his cello were much stronger than his romantic feelings for me – if he had ever developed any romantic feelings for me, which I seriously doubted.

Leaning back into the seat, I thought of Black's apartment, of the huge windows with Venetian blinds and the beautiful monochrome posters on the wall. He didn't have anything in his living room except a TV, a couch and an empty shelf. Even though I had not seen the other rooms of his apartment, I was sure that, if it had not been his apartment but mine, I would have loved it. It was the perfect apartment for people who preferred silent surroundings to shopping centres. My mother would have loved it too.

Black was the living proof that moral sense and good taste (or talent) were not proportional to each other, contrary to popular belief.

With a twinge of conscience, I realized that, though I had not forgotten her, I had got over her death and moved on. Now I could finally think of her without feelings of sadness and anger about her senseless death. However, the discovery that I could live my life without her, and the immense relief I felt at this discovery, seemed to me like the ultimate betrayal.

x.

Feeling a big hand grabbing my shoulders from behind, I woke up with a start.

"Hey, let's get out of the car. You can sleep later," Alec said, withdrawing his hand while Kudo handed me his keys. He had to return to the apartment and give Mifune-san her car back, he told me. We should make ourselves at home in the meantime. He would be back soon.

I got out of the car and took a step towards the gate. Was it really yesterday night that Kudo and I met for the first time? I felt like I was coming home after a long journey.

"Wait, where is my cello?" asked Alec.

"Locked up somewhere where you won't find 'her' on your own," Kudo grinned. "I'll return 'her' to you when I come back."

They had decided that we wouldn't go anywhere tonight unless I absolutely wanted to, Alec informed me after Kudo had driven off. On the way to Kudo's house – while I was sleeping – they had been discussing the matter and agreed that, since I was obviously too tired to celebrate my rescue, the wisest decision would be to put it off.

"We can celebrate it tomorrow, if you like," he said apologetically. "But if you still want to go out tonight, I can call Kudo on his mobile phone. He has just given me his number... We didn't want to wake you up because you looked so tired."

"Or never," I said, smiling with relief. "I hate parties, you know."

"I know. I'm not a party person either. But Kudo seems to have a lot of friends and acquaintances."

"Yes, and a lot of acquaintances who are already dead," I agreed. Knowing that I was going to have dinner alone with Alec and Kudo had lifted my spirits.

"And a lot of hobbies," Alec remarked, pointing at the sundry articles on the floor of Kudo's vast entrance room.

"For which he doesn't have very much time, I suppose, considering that he is always solving cases. He told me that he stumbles over corpses all the time."

"Oh, what a lucky guy."

"Are you being morbid or just ironic?"

"Why morbid? I only meant that he has found the true vocation as a detective," Alec shrugged, kneeling on the floor to admire Kudo's black belt. "And he is not so terribly busy; he still has enough free time to get a black belt."

"Maybe it doesn't belong to him," I joked. "Maybe he only put it on display to show off." I was in good humour.

Alec raised his brow playfully at me, giving me his I-knew-you-would-say-that look.

"Just kidding," I grinned, whereupon he only shook his head and turned his attention to Kudo's black belt and karate clothes.

"You're right. It doesn't belong to him," he suddenly exclaimed. "And the karate clothes don't belong to him either. Well, he is not a giant, but look: they're much too small."

"Strange," I murmured. As the clothes had been lying carelessly in a small heap, I had not noticed that the jacket was really too small to fit Kudo.

"What's this?" Alec, who could not read Kanji, asked, showing me a name which had been sewn on the corner of the black belt.

"It's a name... the name of the owner of that jacket, so it seems. 'Mori Ran'... It must belong to Ran Mori."

Kudo had told me that she was teaching karate in Osaka... I should have guessed that the clothes belonged to her. But I had not expected them to live together when she came to Tokyo... The discovery threw me off balance.

"Ah, a friend of his?"

"His girlfriend, so he told me."

"He told you that he had a girlfriend although he is running after you?"

"He is not running after me."

"What's he doing then? And why did you tell him that I was your boyfriend if he had not bothered you with any of those love letters which you are so allergic to?"

"That's a long story. I just told him from the beginning that I had a boyfriend to avoid misunderstandings."

"You told him that to create misunderstandings, not to avoid them."

"Well, let's say that I created misunderstandings to avoid complications."

"So he did give you the feeling that he was running after you?"

"No, he didn't. I just created misunderstandings to avoid complications from habit."

"Fine. So you lied to your childhood friend just because you didn't want him to fall in love with you?"

"He is not my childhood friend. I met him yesterday night for the first time. Kudo only made up that story. He couldn't tell you the truth because Blondie was sitting next to us."

Alec chuckled. "Blondie and Black, huh? What should we name the third of them?"

"He's only 'the Dustman' for me."

"Well, now that all the three of them are lying in hospital, can you finally tell me what's going on? I have the sneaking suspicion that you've not told me the whole story yet."

"But I did," I lied. "You know it as well as I do: Blondie and Dustman worked for Black, who wanted them to kill reddish-haired women just because he couldn't get the one reddish-haired woman he loved. What else is there to say? That Alec the Self-Proclaimed Shrink and Kudo the Self-Proclaimed Sherlock saved Shiho the Dumb Reddish-Blonde from spending the rest of her life listening to the same sob story of Black's life? How did you manage to find me, anyway?"

"Oh, I'll tell you the tale from the beginning: Alec the Casals of the Twenty-First Century met the Dustman on the way to the boutique, where Shiho the Trouble Magnet had disappeared..."

On the way from the pizzeria to the boutique, he met our nice dustman who suddenly began to unleash a torrent of incomprehensible (Japanese!) sentences at him and then left him of his own accord, he told me. Still puzzled about the occurrence, Alec resumed walking to the boutique and got another unpleasant surprise when he did not find me there. The boutique was empty when he came in. There was only a young saleswoman in the room adjoining the boutique, who was busy talking with somebody on the phone and who completely ignored his shy attempts to get her attention.

First he thought that I was in one of the changing cubicles. But nobody answered when he called my name. Then he spotted the pieces of underwear which were lying in a heap on the floor and got the premonition that something had happened to me. The suspicion was strengthened by the remembrance of the attack on the ex-reddish-blonde in the café. So he left the boutique through the second door and found himself in the same side street where I had met the dustman. The side street was empty. But he heard the sound of an engine and ran instinctively to the end of the street where he spotted the van and recognized the blonde head of my stalker through the window of the van. (Luckily, neither the stalker nor the dustman saw him through the rear-view mirror, as he realized later. Otherwise they wouldn't have let him follow them so easily.)

Since Alec was anything but dumb, he immediately grasped that they must have kidnapped or attacked me, and memorized the number plate of the van before he ran back to the boutique. He left it through the other door (the one opposite the pizzeria), ran towards the bridge, hailed a taxi and told the driver to wait for the van, which – by his calculations – would drive past him on the way to the bridge. After all, both the small side street and the street behind the boutique (where he had seen the van) were one-way streets. And the street behind the boutique led to a dead end. As he did not want to think of the possibility that they had already killed me or harmed me in any way, he decided to follow the van and hoped that he would find a way to contact Kudo as soon as possible.

The van drove past him towards the bridge, as expected. Alec's taxi followed it from some distance. Alec's biggest problem was how to convince the driver to give him his mobile phone; but, being skilled in the art of persuasion, he managed to talk the driver into calling the police for him. He was immediately connected to Kudo when he mentioned his name and said that he had seen the culprits.

"But it seems that Kudo had been following them, too," Alec said. "He said that a police officer was tailing my taxi and the van. He said he would join us as soon as possible... and that I shouldn't pull a stunt, but keep a safe distance. Then the police officer overtook me and I only had to follow him."

"Was it one of the police officers who we had seen in the café?"

"It was the one who had smiled at you. You told me that you knew him."

"Ah, the quiet one... And what happened afterwards?"

"We had to wait for a while in a car park. I got impatient. So, when I saw a street musician walking by, I just got out of the taxi and told him to exchange his clothes with me. Then I messed up my hair and..."

"... and pulled a stunt by running to the house and play the cello directly underneath their window," I finished.

"Oh well, first I walked around the house and pretended to beg. And then I got the idea to play cello so that I could stay there for a while without looking suspicious. Don't look at me like that. My father once told me that I had inherited his cousin's acting skills. I'm sure that everybody mistook me for a real streets musician."

"Thanks for saving me and risking our lives directly afterwards," I smiled. "You made a brilliant street musician, I must say... and your cello arrangement of the fourth _Sarcasm_ was great. But you really need a shower now... And I wouldn't stay in these clothes if I were you..."

Suddenly it dawned on me that the clothes couldn't have belonged to Black, as they fitted Alec perfectly.

Black was short and plump...

"Oh, I'll wait until Kudo comes back. He said he'd fetch my baggage from that expensive locker of the Grande Suzuki," Alec said.

...and Alec was thin and tall...

The clothes couldn't have belonged to the dustman or my blonde stalker either. The blonde man didn't have Alec's long legs, just as the dustman had such broad shoulders that he couldn't have forced them into the shirt Alec was wearing now.

Again I saw myself turning round to search for the nameplate. I saw Kudo taking my hand, pulling me away. I saw him putting his arm around my shoulders and spinning round in annoyance to Alec who was running in the direction of the courtyard to search for the nameplate. As the scenes replayed in my head, I wondered how I could have been so naive, so blind...

"What's up, Shiho?"

"Nothing. I was only thinking... You haven't told me whether you had found a nameplate or not," I said, seating myself on a stair. It could be a coincidence. The shirt could belong to Blondie whereas the trousers belonged to the dustman, who might have been thinner one or two years ago...

"Oh, I did. But you were sleeping."

"You did find a nameplate?"

"No, no, I wanted to say that I told you and Kudo, and that you didn't hear me because you were sleeping. There was no nameplate for that apartment."

"Oh," I said, feeling a wave of relief wash over me.

"But it's still strange," Alec said, shaking his head. "I went to the front door and searched for a nameplate again. And there was none."

"Why is it strange?"

"It seems to me that somebody has removed the nameplate on the postbox."

"And what's strange about that? If I had been Black, I would have removed my nameplate, too..."

"I mean..." He sat down on a stair and shook his head in annoyance. "Maybe my memory is playing a trick on me ... But I could have sworn that there had been nameplates on all of the postboxes before the police came."

x.x.x.


	10. Sarcasm 5, 1 : Precipitosissimo

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasm V (1)**

"Precipitosissimo"

x.

It was impossible to talk to Alec without returning to the topic of music. After concluding that his memory must have played a trick on him because there was no reason the police and Kudo should be interested in hiding the nameplate of Black's apartment, he changed the course of our conversation and asked me whether I had already prepared myself for my concert or not.

"Beethoven is okay. I still have to work on Prokofjew. I need to gather speed for the first and the third _Sarcasm_. The second _Sarcasm_ is a pain, as expected. I always miss a few keys. The forth _Sarcasm_ doesn't give me any headaches, but I have not practiced the fifth _Sarcasm_ yet," I informed him in short, jerky sentences.

I did not feel like talking. My mind was still on Kudo and the nameplate on the postbox of Black's apartment. But, after a while, it became impossible to resist Alec's enthusiasm. And we spent the time until Kudo's return talking about Prokofjew and his _Sarcasms_, whose sharp dissonances and harshness brought their creator international fame. Prokofjew, who – just like his rival Rachmaninow – was a bitter, cold and cynical man, seemed to have written them out of spite. Ironically, the pieces which he wrote during one of the worst phases of his life (he was suffering from the lack of recognition the world showed for his works and the consequential poverty!) were a great success.

The fifth _Sarcasm_ was probably the most famous owing to its chords at the beginning which reminded one of derisive laughing and which, when they returned after the uncanny middle-part, transformed into that kind of chuckle which got stuck in one's throat. There was a famous quote that has always been connected to this last piece of the _Sarcasms_. I don't remember who said it or where I read about it, as I have a bad memory for names. I don't even know if I remember it correctly. Regardless, I always think of it whenever I think about the consequences of that summer five years ago.

It said that most of us had once laughed about a stupid mistake and then suddenly realized that, if you could laugh at something which had led to such disastrous, dire consequences, the joke was not on the person you laughed about but on you.

x.

Much to my annoyance, Kudo was not alone when he came back. Mifune-san & Co had come with him, along with at least ten boxes of pizza and just as many bottles of wine and drinks.

"Shinichi-kun said that you're too tired to go to the restaurant. So we decided to bring the restaurant to you. I hope you don't mind that the three of us are having dinner with you. The more the merrier, huh?" Mifune chirped, linking arms with me. "It was me who bought pizzas for you," she whispered to me in a conspiratorial tone. "Shinichi-kun wanted to buy rice soup again, imagine that."

Suppressing the urge to tell her that I would have preferred rice soup to pizza, I smiled and decided to make an effort to behave as amiably as possible under the circumstances. It was not owing to her that I felt like shutting myself into the guestroom and fall into a death-like sleep, but owing to Kudo and the nameplate-affair. I realized with bitterness that I had fallen in love with a mystery freak who was not in the least in love with me. And it was mortifying to my pride that he knew about the extent of my feelings for him.

During dinner, Mifune-san, Alec and the plump police officer – who was apparently on a diet – kept the conversation from dying down while Kudo, the ex-waiter and I focused on the pizzas. The ex-waiter would smile at me silently from time to time, beholding my face wistfully (when he thought that I was not looking) as if he too, found that I bore an uncanny resemblance to his lost love.

I don't remember exactly what the conversations at the table were about. Five years are a long time, especially when you spend them working arduously on a gigantic undertaking which is doomed to fail. However, I still have a vivid memory of the moment when the reporters rang at Kudo's door.

"Who would ring at such a time?" Mifune-san asked.

"Probably a new client," the plump man said, greedily devouring the remaining pizzas on the table with his eyes. "We never run out of cases."

"No, it's the reporters," Kudo sighed. He looked over the table and smiled nervously at me. "Please go upstairs and shut yourselves up in the guestroom or in my bedroom," he told Alec and me. "Don't open the window and don't switch on the light. Just pretend that you're not here."

Alec and I went upstairs, but did not shut ourselves up as he told us. As I wanted to hear the official version of the case, I left the door slightly ajar. It was impossible for me to overhear every word they said, for Kudo did not let the reporters enter his house but received them at the gate. But I could hear enough to understand that the reporters only asked Kudo and the police the usual questions and received the usual answers (No, the police couldn't and wouldn't say anything about the case before they were absolutely sure etcetera) until a reporter – one with a very loud voice – asked Kudo whether it was true that the apartment where the culprits had kept "the last victim" – me! – really belonged to his father, who had died in a fire fifteen years ago.

It was true, Kudo answered. However, he couldn't tell why the culprits had chosen his apartment. Probably they thought that the best hiding place was in the house of your enemy. After all, Casanova had succeeded. So why should they fail?

"But they did almost succeed, didn't they?" continued the reporter. "I heard that the police had been waiting for them at three different apartments whose addresses you told them. The police were so late because all of the addresses were wrong, is it true?"

Yes, it was true. He did not try to deny it. The addresses belonged to the three men. And he did not expect them to bring the last victim to another address. But now that he had told them everything he knew, they should leave him alone and return to their offices to write their articles.

Only one last question, and then they would leave him alone: Who was his mysterious mother? They heard that his parents met each other in New York. But nobody of his father's friends had ever met her. According to the rumors, she was an ingenious scientist. And was it true that she was shot by a mysterious organization shortly before his father died?

Well, he couldn't tell them anything about his mother because he did not know anything about her either, Kudo said. He had never seen or heard anything of her. They should leave him alone now. Good night.

x.

He immediately knew – or at least I was sure that he knew – that I had overheard them when Alec and I returned to the dinner table. We spent the rest of the evening in oppressive silence while Mifune-san tried to cheer us up by ranting about the reporters: They had never tried to catch a murderer before. What did they know about Kudo's job? Trying to sound him out about personal matters at ten o'clock in the evening was even more impertinent. She could remember that, ten years ago, the reporters had been a bit more intelligent. They might have been a pain too, but they did not try to bother one at home at such a time. Anyway, we were having a party. Let's forget them.

Although all of us tried to chime in and get into the party mood, our efforts were all to no avail. I had the feeling that all of us were relieved when we heard the clock at the wall striking eleven. Mifune-san stood up, exclaiming that she had not thought that it was already so late – "Time flies when you're having fun!" – and that they should really drive home now so that we could go to bed.

After they were gone, Alec reminded me of the practical, prosaic side of life when he asked: "The bed in the guestroom is a bit small for both of us, isn't it? Where am I going to sleep tonight?"

Kudo and Alec were certainly not fond of sharing Kudo's bedroom with each other, not only because Kudo's bed was much too small for two people, but also because – at least I doubt that – neither of them wanted to share a bed with a stranger. And they couldn't possibly expect me to share my bed with any of them.

The problem was resolved when Kudo told us that there was still the bedroom of his parents, which was lying directly next to his room.

"You can sleep in the guestroom," Kudo told Alec. "Haibara can move to my parents' bedroom."

I could have suggested that I stayed in the guestroom while Alec could sleep in the bedroom of Kudo's parents, which would spare us the move. However, I felt that there was a reason why Kudo wanted me to sleep in the bedroom of his parents. So I took my suitcase and moved into the last room of the corridor while Kudo brought Alec's cello – which he had locked up in the wardrobe of his parents' bedroom – into the guestroom. No sooner had Alec seen his cello than he lost interest in the mysteries around him and devoted his whole attention to his cello, meaning that he unpacked it, inspected it with fastidious care, polished it and even began to talk to it. Seeing that everything was alright with his cello, I bid him goodnight, shut the door of the guestroom and left his cello and him alone.

"What about a private talk?" Kudo, who was leaning against the door of his bedroom, asked me when I walked past him.

"Where?"

"Either in your room or in mine," he said. "I'd prefer not to talk on the corridor or downstairs where somebody-" he indicated the guestroom where Alec was staying, "- can walk in on us at any moment."

"Then we talk in your room," I said. "But I'll unpack my suitcase first. I'd like to show you something."

He grinned at me.

"Fine, I'll go downstairs and make us some tea."

x.

The bedroom of Kudo's parents was a vast room with a double bed, a vanity table beside the bed, a huge window with red velvet curtains, a huge desk with a PC and a printer, two chairs and a gigantic wardrobe with mirrors. I opened the wardrobe to look if they were two-way mirrors and ascertained that they were not. I was only getting paranoid again.

The old cardigan of my mother was the first thing to greet me when I opened my suitcase. It was huge, pale blue, had a hood and two pockets with zippers. She looked lost in that oversized cardigan, and the pale blue colour did not match her hair. I had never understood why she loved it so much until it dawned on me that it must have belonged to my father.

Now that I knew that he did love her and only died before he could marry her, the cardigan seemed less ugly to me. However, I had the feeling that I was standing at the edge of an abyss, hesitating whether to jump down and face the hideous truth or turn on my heals and run away from it. To find out that Kudo was really my brother seemed to me to be worse than death. As courage was not my forte, I was inclined to choose the easy way and return to London before I found out too much about my mother's past.

Kudo was eighteen, meaning that he was a few months (nine or ten?) or even a year older than me. According to what I had heard from the reporters, his mother had been a scientist and been shot by a secret organization while his father had died in a fire. Adding those pieces of information to the things Black told me, I drew the obvious conclusion that Kudo and I must have had the same mother – who had not been shot because my father had rescued her before the organization could execute her – and probably even the same father. Still, there were things which did not fit into this version of the story. Black had told me that my mother's boyfriend had been shot while the reporters said that Kudo's father had died in a fire. And I couldn't imagine why my mother had left Kudo in Tokyo (where he was raised by Agasa?) while she and I moved to London. She was, despite her outward coldness and indifference, a very affectionate person. I could not imagine why she would abandon her son. It just did not make sense.

There was only a small knock at the door before it flew open and Kudo came in.

"You need a lot of time to unpack you suitcase," he said, a deadpan expression on his smug face.

"You need a lot of time to make tea."

"No, I didn't. I've been waiting for you. The tea is getting cold."

"And I was waiting for you to call me when you're finished."

"Why didn't you get the idea to come to my room when you were finished?"

"Not everybody enters another person's bedroom at night as a matter of course like you do."

"I knocked before I entered the room."

"You knocked only once and then immediately opened the door," I corrected him.

"So what? It wasn't like you were naked when I came in."

"What if I had been naked? What would you have done?"

"I'd have apologized and left the room after telling you that you should put on some clothes and come to my room to have tea. What else should I have done?"

"Why do I have the feeling that we're bickering with each other every time we are alone?"

"We haven't been alone with each other that much," he remarked, gallantly opening the door of his bedroom for me. And I wondered why such a gesture always seemed a bit mocking to me when it came from him.

"Thank to your friends," I retorted. "But the tea is still hot. You've been lying at me."

He had set up a huge tray with fragrant jasmine tea and chocolate biscuit on the floor and placed two cushions next to each other in front of the provisional "tea table".

"You have been lying at me, too, 'Miyano'," Kudo said. "And don't blame everything on my friends. We don't have much time with each other because your boyfriend absolutely wanted to come to Tokyo."

I flopped onto the floor, thinking that it was not fair of us to have tea without Alec. But Kudo seemed to have something to tell me which he did not want anybody else to hear. And I tried to set my guilty conscience at ease with the thought that Alec had never liked tea and rather disliked sweets.

"Alec is not my boyfriend," I said, deciding that it was the best moment to give up the whole game.

"I'm glad that he isn't," Kudo smiled. "Honestly, I doubt that he loves you. His cello is a great rival, isn't it?"

"No, it's more like an ally. I'm not in love with him either. But how did you guess that he was not my boyfriend?"

"I was sure that he wasn't when you didn't want to share a room with him," he said. "If you had been his girlfriend, you wouldn't have minded."

"Maybe the only reason I didn't want to share a room with him was that I feared he would snore and wake me up in the middle of the night," I said. "Why could you be so sure that I was not his girlfriend?"

"I had the feeling you'd rather share the room with me than with him."

"You're being delusional," I said, piqued about his self-assured smile. "I would never share a room with you."

He chuckled. "But you're doing it at the moment."

"No, no, we're having tea together. That's all. Let me remind you that it was you who wanted to have a private talk with me. After that I'll go back to your parents' bedroom to spend the night there."

Kudo stood up and walked towards the wardrobe with the mirror.

"Oh no," I said in a low voice. "You can't possibly mean that!" I knew that there was something wrong with the wardrobe in my room. It only didn't occur to me that it might be connected to Kudo's wardrobe and probably also functioned as a lift. That's why Kudo said that we were sharing a room.

"Look," Kudo said proudly. He opened his wardrobe, pressed a small button, closed the door of the wardrobe again and then stepped back. The whole wardrobe sank gradually into the floor, revealing another wardrobe, which I recognized as the wardrobe in his parents' bedroom.

"Agasa and his inventions," he chuckled. "Now I can either walk through your wardrobe to your room or just pull at this string."

"Let me guess. The other wardrobe would disappear, too. And we would be sharing one room."

"Exactly," he said, pulling at the string. The wardrobe sank down into the floor, as expected. Kudo had just turned the two rooms into one.

"I would like to keep an eye on you in case something happens," he said, his "something" evoking the image of black-clad assassins sneaking through the dark house to take revenge on the people who had dared to oppose their secret organization.

"What would Ran say if she knew that you're going to share your room with another girl?" I asked, making a feeble attempt to protest.

"Well, we will see it tomorrow," he smiled. "I gave her a call when I was making tea in the kitchen. I told them I was too busy with the cases to come to Osaka at the moment. So Agasa and she will come to Tokyo instead. Ran said they'd be here by tomorrow night."

x.


	11. Sarcasm 5, 2: Precipitosissimo

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Sarcasms V (2)**

"Precipitosissimo"

x.

As my mind had been preoccupied with my mother's past and her possible relationship with Kudo's father, I had completely forgotten about Ran. I still remembered that Kudo had told me in the café that she would like to meet me. However, I did not expect us to meet so soon. I surmised she was alarmed when she heard that her boyfriend had – once again? – befriended himself with some damsel in distress and even let this damsel in distress stay at his house for a night. It must have seem even more dangerous to her when he told her that the same girl would be staying longer at his house than expected. I couldn't blame her that she felt like jumping into the next train to have a look at her rival.

But Kudo's house did not have enough rooms for all of us, unless he shared a room with Ran. As I was not a masochist, I would rather go back to the Grand Suzuki than stay here any longer.

"How long do I have to stay in here?" I asked Kudo, who had flopped down next to me.

"The question is not how long you have to stay in Japan but how long you would like to stay in Japan," he corrected me and poured tea into my cup.

"You mean that the police doesn't need me? I can leave whenever I want? But didn't you tell Alec that you wouldn't let us go anywhere until the case was officially closed?"

"I was lying," he said matter-of-factly. "We only need to take down your witness account. And you can either leave Japan or stay here." He smiled at me. "Do you like my tea?"

"Very much, although I didn't expect that it would be so sweet. Well, since I can leave whenever I like, I'd like to return to London as soon as possible. I think I'll take the next flight," I said, trying to sound nonchalant, and took another sip of my tea.

Kudo gave me an uncomprehending look. "But why so soon?" he asked.

"Because Ran would use her karate skills to kill me if she met me here," I said. "I must return to London anyway. I have to practise for my concert. The fifth _Sarcasm_-"

"Ran will not kill you, I assure you," he interrupted me. The fifth _Sarcasm_ obviously didn't interest him.

"You mean she is not a jealous person?"

"She can be very jealous. And her karate skills are terrific. But she won't be jealous of you."

Ah, either Ran was a very confident woman, or I was really not his type.

"Where will she stay? I hope you don't want to share the room with both of us." The idea had come to me that he might ask me to share the bedroom of his parents with Ran.

"Ran and Agasa will stay at Agasa's house," he said. "Agasa is my neighbor. Have you forgotten that?"

"You would let your girlfriend stay with your neighbour and share a room with a stranger?" I stared at him in shock.

He gave me a sad smile.

"You still don't get it, do you? I've been lying at you, too. Ran is not my girlfriend. She and I are just childhood friends. We get along very well, that's all."

"But the photos-"

"The photos are old," he said. "We had been going out with each other for a few months until we noticed that we were really not made for each other." He had stood up and sat himself onto his bed. Looking up at him, I noticed that he was watching me with melancholy.

"She fell in love with someone else," I said.

"I fell in love with someone else," he said. "I was sorry that I didn't realize it earlier."

"May I ask who the unlucky girl is?" I asked, thinking that it was ironic that I had been jealous of Ran for the whole time while he was in love with another girl.

He smiled.

"I'll tell you if you drink up your tea and promise me that you will stay here."

"I can't stay," I said, feeling that I had to go if I didn't want to make matters worse. "At least you can tell me why she is not here with you."

"Because she doesn't love me," he said. "She would rather spend an eternity with her computer than with me. She once told me that. She thinks that we're only friends, anyway."

"If she really doesn't know about your feelings for her, she might have said it only to tease you. Why don't you just tell her?"

"I can't," he smiled. "I'll tell her when she comes back. But why don't you want to stay here?"

"I must practise for my concert. But, if you miss me so much, you can visit me in London someday. I have enjoyed my holidays in Tokyo greatly, by the way." The last sentence was meant to be ironic and humorous, considering that I had spent my "holidays" being stalked and kidnapped. But I realized that I actually meant it. Despite Black and his secret organization, despite my sudden, unrequited infatuation with somebody who might be my brother and the (unsolved?) mystery of my mother's death, I discovered that I had really enjoyed the past twenty-six hours.

Drinking up my tea, I reflected that there was the possibility that this discovery, too, was just self-deception and/or self-protection. I no longer knew for sure what I really felt. My view of the world was continually changing. And there were disturbing images in my mind… certainly parts of memories which I had once blotted out and which had come flooding back to me when I met Kudo again – for I was sure that we had met before, long ago, so long that it seemed to me that we had known each other in another life. Now, when I looked at Kudo's face, I could clearly see his resemblance to the small boy with black hair and blue eyes who I had seen in my dreams.

I remembered the rain in Tokyo. I remembered the snow, the men and women in black suits and the laboratories. There had been sunny days, too, which I had spent on the beach or in the city in the company of an old, funny-looking man and a group of children. I could see clearly the faces of the young black-haired woman and the tall man with the cool eyes. However, I only saw disconnected scenes and pictures, tiny pieces of a jigsaw puzzle which I might never solve in my life. And there were many things that absolutely did not make sense, for example the small black-haired girl with huge innocent eyes who reminded me so much of Mifune-san, or a freckled tall boy who looked like the ex-waiter who I met yesterday night.

It was as if a thick blanket of fog had covered my mind.

"It doesn't work," Kudo whispered to himself, looking frustrated.

As my feelings were in a great muddle and the whole world seemed surreal to me, his strange behaviour did not disturb me as much as it would have a few hours ago.

"What doesn't work?" I asked, mildly surprised.

"I wanted to drug you," he smiled at me, indicating the empty cup I was still holding. "Actually, I've already done it. But it doesn't work."

"You've put something into my tea?" I raised my brow at him.

"Not only in your tea. I put a bit of the drug yesterday night into your iced tea, too."

"And what is the drug supposed to do?" I asked him. "Giving me hallucinations? Why did you want to drug me, anyway?" Perhaps it was only my imagination. But I had the feeling that the room was getting unbearably cold. Maybe Kudo was not joking at all…

"I wanted you to remember me," he sighed. "But it doesn't work. And I can't give you more because you would die from a third dose."

"It's getting terribly cold here," I said and put the empty cup back on the tray. "Do you feel it, too?" When I withdrew my hand, I noticed in horror that I began to tremble uncontrollably.

He grabbed my hand and felt my forehead. I could see that he was saying something to me. But I could not hear what he said. Then he pulled out of his pocket a small box, took out a capsule and popped it into my mouth. When I swallowed it, I was getting warmer until I had the feeling that I was sitting in a sauna. Kudo was holding me in his arms, stroking my back, muttering something which I could not hear.

I suddenly found myself in London again, walking home after a rehearsal with the first cellist I had to accompany. Suffering from the side effects of my latest experiment, I was harsher than usual, snubbing him pitilessly because he was getting on my nerves. I felt irritated and ill, had problems to climb the stairs to my small apartment and breathed a sigh of relief when I could finally shut the door of my apartment behind me. I took of my jacket, put on my favourite blue cardigan, flopped into a chair and stayed there until the haze before my eyes was gone. Then I went to the window and looked out.

The first cellist, who seemed to have been waiting for a while in front of my house, was walking slowly away. Now that I felt a bit better, I pitied him and felt a twinge of conscience at having treated him so coldly. However, I did not feel like calling him back and waste time justifying myself to him. The poor boy would soon find another girl who could love him back, anyway. From past experience, I knew that one got over unrequited love after a while. It might leave a scar, but the wound was never so deep that it could not heal.

The sun was setting, and I wondered how many sunsets I would see until I found the real antidote. Fifteen years had passed since the downfall of the Black Organization, and, although Kudo said that he no longer wanted it, I was still searching for it. The first one, which I created fifteen years ago, had temporarily turned Kudo and me back to our original sizes for two months and then almost killed both of us so that we had to take APTX4869 for a second time; the second one, which I found ten years ago, had – ironically – just the effect which the perfect APTX4869 was supposed to have. It accelerated the regenerative process so dramatically that we were practically immortal. Taking APTX4869 again would just make us younger, but not decelerate the regenerative process. However, two years ago, I found a solution, a new drug which could undo the effects of the second antidote. I had tested it on the mice and did not observe any side effects apart from a harmless disorder of the digestive system. Moreover, all of its effects could be undone by taking a pill of APTX4869. I thought I had found the ultimate solution to our problem.

Of course it was another failure again, although the mental disorder was somewhat amusing to Kudo at the beginning. He told me that I had developed very charming personalities. Every two weeks another Miyano Shiho or Haibara Ai would find a new excuse to visit him. All of them fell in love with him sooner or later and – since none of them had been raised by the Organization – all of them were much more amiable than me, which (so he told me!) made it extremely hard for him to resist them. Six months after I took the antidote, the visits grew less frequent, and I observed that the time when I returned to my real self was getting longer and longer. As a result, I thought that the side effects of the drug were wearing off. Although they had been annoying, they had never really endangered our lives.

I did not feel the need to take APTX4869 yet. Of course I knew that APTX4869 would not kill me and would not even shrink me, now that I had taken the third antidote. However, I could remember the immeasurable pain which APTX caused. And since the mice whom I gave one pill of the third antidote and afterwards two pills of APTX4869 could neither grow nor turn back to their original size, I did not feel inclined to take it. It would mean that, once I had been "cured" from the third antidote, a second pill of APTX would turn me into a child forever.

Despite the Professor's advice that I should take APTX as soon as possible, I told myself to wait for another month and give the new antidote a chance. I must admit that I was extremely fascinated by my new project and watched with amusement the development of my multiple personalities.

However, things took a different turn when I suddenly developed a personality that was stronger than all of the others. She took over my mind for a whole week, changed her name into Miyano Akemi and moved out of the small apartment I shared with Kudo to London, where she entered the conservatoire under my real name. Miyano Shiho, my latest personality, had a remarkable musical talent, a bit of my sarcasm and was even interested in chemistry. I considered her to be the girl I would have become if I had not been raised by the Organization.

I left the window and sat down at the piano, opened the scores of Prokofjew's _Sarcasms_ and studied them curiously. It was unexplainable to me how I could obsess over a few scores and eighty-eight keys. There were apparently so many hidden corners in the human-mind that it was impossible for one person to explore all of them.

The whole experiment had been a failure, I thought in frustration. The only thing which gave me some consolation was that I had tested this cursed drug on myself and had not given it to Kudo.

Reading the scores, I discovered a small note saying that my alter ego was going to have a concert in August and decided that it was time to call Kudo and tell him to give me a pill of APTX4869.

x.

I was still lying in Kudo's lap when I opened my eyes. First I did not understand what was going on. But then I looked down at my grey dress, which had become so huge that it almost slipped from my shoulders, and remembered.

"What have you done," I sighed, looking at my tiny hands. "How could you put APTX into my tea without telling me?"

"Welcome back, 'Ai-chan'," Kudo laughed quietly. "Would you have taken APTX if I had told you the real story?"

"I would have thought you were mad," I muttered. But I would still have taken it, I thought, thinking of the strong feelings I – or rather "she" – had had for him before he gave me APTX4869. "What was the thing you poured into my tea before you gave me the pill?"

"Oh, that… the Professor invented it. He said it was a harmless drug which would lower your body temperature so that APTX wouldn't hurt you too much.

"Why didn't you give me APTX4869 first and then give me the other drug?" I asked, wondering whether that was the reason why APTX had shrunk me. During the tests with the mice, I had observed that a pill of APTX would not shrink the mice but only undo the side effects of the third antidote on the digestive system. But I still felt too tired to think. I could not even move and had to stay on Kudo's lap. It must be a side effect of the drug the Professor created for me. I admitted with resignation that there was probably no drug without a side effect in the world.

"I gave you APTX4869 with the iced tea," Kudo said. "But it didn't have an effect on you. That's why I gave you the other drug first and then gave you APTX for a second time. And it worked." He grinned at me.

"You shrank me," I said weakly, too angry to be sarcastic.

"That's only fair," he said. "It was you who shrank me first." He ruffled my hair playfully. "I have completely forgotten how cute you look at the age of seven."

"I had the feeling you found me cute, too, before you shrank me," I remarked. "You've been flirting with me all the time. Tickling me in that side street was really not necessary, you know, just as the other things I don't want to mention now."

He grinned at the remembrance. "You didn't seem to mind. And I remember that I already told you that you can be really lovely when you lost your memory," he said. "I almost fell in love with your alter ego."

I looked at his smiling face and felt a pang of regret when I thought of my fleeting passion for him. Now that I had distanced myself from the happenings of the last hours, I recalled that there had been moments when I had felt something close to unconditional love and overwhelming desire, all the famous feelings that were so seldom found. Without my memory of my past with the Black Organization, I had been a spontaneous, somewhat romantic girl who tried to make herself believe that she was sarcastic. Now that I had returned to my real distant self, I could feel the thick wall of cynicism that was preventing myself from falling in love with Kudo as my alter ego did. I had seen too much of the world… I had had too many experiences. I could not love him like I might have done if I had not regained my memory.

Between Kudo and me, there was only a fading ghost of what I had felt for him many years ago, when both of us were shrunk and when he was still too much in love with Mori Ran to notice me. Moreover, there were other ghosts in my mind that were so much stronger than the ghost of my love for him. There were the memories of Shuichi, Gin, my sister and my dark past. It did not surprise me that I could still remember Shuichi, my sister and Ayumi-chan ("Mifune-san"!) when I lost my memory. It only surprised me that I had completely forgotten Gin although he was probably the only person in the world who had ever been able to fill my heart with pure hate.

Usually, I did not remember what I did when I lost my memory. But this time, I remembered all the things that happened since I left London for Tokyo. And my whole being clung at the alter ego I had just lost.

"She really loved you," I said, trying to stand up as I felt I was getting stronger. "I can still remember what I felt when I was her. It is somewhat disturbing to me, you know."

"I know she did," he said quietly, holding out his hand, which I did not take. I was not so tired that I couldn't stand up on my own.

"Why didn't you tell her the truth and let her decide whether she wanted to have her memories back or not?" I asked, curiously watching his reaction. "Didn't you love her, too? Why did you pretend to be in love with somebody else?"

"I told her the truth," he said calmly. "I had to choose between her and you, which was not a very hard choice for me."

It took me a while to grasp the hidden meaning of his last sentence and to remember that he told her – well, me! – that he was in love with somebody who would rather spend an eternity with her computer than with him. I recalled that I had said something like that a few years ago, when he was whining about me spending too much time in front of the computer and working in my lab instead of going with him to Tropical Island. But, as I had always connected Tropical Island to his love for Mori, I did not want to go. I felt like a replacement for her and thought that he only wanted to spend more time with me to forget her.

"But you told her that you realized you were in love with somebody else when you were going out with Ran," I said, confused. "You were ly-"

"It was the truth," he said, dismissing my protest. "I would have told you long ago. But you have never given me the chance to tell you. You made a sarcastic remark every time I tried."

We were looking silently at each other as if each of us was trying to read the other's thoughts.

"You see, the problem between us is that you seem love the side of me who doesn't love you anymore while you don't love the side of me who loves you…" I began nervously. The truth was that I did not know what to say. In reality, I had stopped loving him long ago. However, a part of the Miyano Shiho who he had meant to kill with APTX4869 was still alive...

"Don't make everything so complicated only because we'll have an eternity to discuss it," Kudo sighed. "You don't have to love me all the time, you know. You can always take a few hours off."

I blinked at him, speechless about the suggestion. But then I had to agree that it was a really good solution to our problem.

"Does it mean 'yes'?" he asked, beaming.

"Uh, sure," I answered and took his outstretched hand.

He lifted me onto the bed so that we had the same height. Since we did not know what we should do with each other, we only embraced each other silently, and he brushed his lips quickly against my cheek when we parted.

I looked inquiringly at him. We might as well have stayed friends if he did not even want to kiss me, I thought with disappointment. Our relationship was definitely lacking romance.

"Uh, I think that's all we can do with each other at the moment, can we?" he remarked nervously. "I feel like a pedophile when I look at you. I think you should take the antidote as soon as possible."

I had completely forgotten how small I was.

"What antidote?" I asked and felt a cold wave of realization washing over me. "There is no antidote…"

"No antidote?" he asked in surprise. "But we have a plenty of antidotes, haven't we? What about Antidote Number Two? It made us immortal the first time we took it. What else can happen to you if you take it for the second time?"

"Nothing," I said. "It will make me immortal again. But it won't turn me back into the old size, Kudo… I mean, Shinichi… I had experimented with the mice. One pill of APTX4869 would take away the side effects of the third antidote. But two pills would shrink them. And once they were shrunk, nothing could make them grow again."

"But I've only given you one pill of APTX4869," he said.

"You said you gave me two, one into the iced tea and one into the tea."

"But the first one didn't work…"

I shook my head.

"My first memories came back yesterday night," I said. "It seemed that it did work, only very slowly."

He sank down next to me. And, as we were sitting on the bed next to each other, both too shocked to say anything, it occurred to me that, although I had worried about so many things in the past days, I had never thought that this would happen. I had thought that he did not love me, that his father had been killed because of my mother… I had even thought that he was my half-brother or my brother. I had imagined myself sitting in a plane back to London. I had expected that Kudo and I would part forever and never meet each other again… But I never expected this.

Although our minds were always searching for the logic behind everything, real life never made sense, I reflected. The only way to be happy was to adjust yourself to it, to change the things you could change and to accept the things you could not change. Happiness did not have anything to do with love, friendship, power or money. It was just a simple state of mind. Why should we crave for so many things if we could lose everything in a blink of an eye? Why did we want to love somebody? Why did we search for the ultimate truth if there was none? Everything that existed in the world existed only for us because it existed in our minds. That was the one truth I found when I was thrown into the abyss. That was the truth I did not want to see.

That was the reason Vanitas was such a popular theme in the fields of arts, I thought. Our whole situation suddenly seemed so absurd and senseless to me that I began to chuckle quietly to myself.

"What are you laughing about?" he asked gravely, flashing me an irritated look.

I smirked at him, amused. But then I saw the infinite pain in his eyes and realized that things were not as simple as that. In contrast to me, he was really suffering because he had not bothered to cover himself with a hard shell of cynicism. He had simply taken the plunge and was facing the consequences. There was no philosophy in the world that could save him now.

There were no stories with a happy ending, just as there was nothing in the world that was perfect. It was impossible to create a perfect antidote just as it was impossible to love the same person forever and without condition, my reason told me. However, another voice in my head protested, saying that I was philosophizing again and that we would give up ourselves if we did not try; and once we had given up, we could as well die. It would not make a difference.

As he said, I could always take a few hours off…

"Sorry," I said, touching his hand. "It was not so funny at all. I think I'll take the second antidote tomorrow. And then I'll have an eternity to work on a new antidote."

"I'm so sorry." He sighed, pulled me into his lap and rested his chin on my head. "I can take APTX, too, so that we're both children. It would make life easier."

"It wouldn't. It's easier to solve your cases while you're an adult, isn't it? Ouch. Please take your pointed chin from my head. By the way, things could have been worse than they are now. Just imagine you were my brother…"

"Your brother?" He looked down at me and grimaced. "How did you come up with that idea?"

x.

Later, when we were lying in his small bed, I felt how my bitterness gradually faded away, making place for other feelings which I had not expected to feel again. When I closed my eyes, I felt his warmth breath tickling my skin and thought frivolously of all the nice things I could expect from him after I found the antidote.

x.x.x.


	12. Sarcasms: Epilogue

Disclaimer: The plot and characters in "Detective Conan" belong to Gosho Aoyama. I only borrowed them to write a fanfiction and do not make any profit.  
Thanks a lot to our wonderful beta-reader DoRaeMon (Astarael00/Rae00).

x.

FS

x.

**Sarcasms**

x.

**Epilogue**

x.

"If you weren't so sarcastic..." he said quietly, pretending to talk to himself.

I could neither see the expression on his face in the darkness, nor really care what it was like. He had lied to me too many times without his face or his voice giving him away. He was giving a brilliant performance of the rejected admirer again, and I wondered if he had intentionally chosen the place in the darkest corner of the room to hide his face from me. I kept staring through the window and registered absently that there was a couple looking almost like us standing at the bus station, holding hands. He – a tall guy with long black hair – was smoking while she – a short-haired redhead – was smiling stupidly at the snowflakes falling on her outstretched free hand. Somehow the scene seemed absurd and almost funny to me. It was like looking at a clichéd picture that belonged to an alternative reality. Perhaps it would really work between us if I didn't belong to the Organization and he didn't belong to the FBI... if we were the same age and could have a normal date in a park or in a cinema instead meeting in an empty house... if he had not misused my trust to get information from me... if it was not my own sister, his childhood friend, who was given the task to spy on him...

Too many _"if's"_, I thought.

"... If you thought it over again, you would come to the conclusion that I had no choice," he continued, following my gaze. "There was no way I could tell you that I work for the FBI, don't you think so?"

"No, you couldn't," I said calmly. "Of course there was no logical reason for you to tell me the truth. It would be ridiculous of you to think you just broke my heart. I've never been serious about you, Akai."

"Shiho," he said, making an effort to look hurt. He obviously thought it would sound romantic if he chose this moment to call me by my first name for the first time.

At the bus station, the young man put out his cigarette, took his girlfriend's hand and got onto the bus, which slowly chugged away. The driver didn't seem to be in a hurry, in contrast to me. I had let this FBI agent steal too much of my precious free time.

"I must go now," I said, pulling the hood of my jacket over my head. "Thanks again for hiding me from your colleagues. I guess we're square."

"If Gin finds out you have spent the night here with me, he'll ask you why I let you go instead of arresting you," he said. "Our 'friends' will suspect you of cooperating with the FBI, now that my cover is blown. Why don't you give it a second thought and come with me instead of going back?"

He took a step towards me and made a gesture as if he wanted to take my hand. But I had already turned away from him and walked towards the door. He did not attempt to stop me. I supposed he had spent enough time with me to know that, once I had made the final decision, I would not change my mind.

Still, he followed me silently to the door and walked with me towards the gate of the deserted house. When I summoned the courage to look at him for the last time, I noticed that he was frowning at me, fixing me with an intense green gaze that reminded me unpleasantly of Gin.

"Why?" he asked. "I know you don't want to work for them. Your sister doesn't either. My proposal applies to both of you. If you leave the Organization-"

"If we left the Organization, we wouldn't have any place to go to," I answered. "They would find us and eliminate us like they do with any other traitors. I'm sorry. But I'm not a born hero like you, you see. I'd rather work for the devil and stay alive than be free and dead."

"I'll protect you," he said firmly, in his sweetest voice. He was obviously enchanted by the idea of playing the knight in shining armour for a damsel (or two damsels) in distress.

"From Gin," I asked flatly. Did he seriously believe that I would trust him more than Gin, whom I had known for my whole life? Gin's reactions were predictable, for Gin always followed a few very simple rules. As long as Akemi-nee-san and I followed our orders and didn't endanger the Organization, he would let us live in peace. He had even proved to be good company and seemed to have a certain weakness for me. Looking at the matter of this point of view, I decided that I could trust Gin more than an FBI agent who had pretended to be in love with me because he wanted to gather information about the highest members of the Organization.

"We will leave the Organization some day," I said, "but not as traitors. We will find a way to buy our freedom. I don't want to be protected and watched by anybody."

"They will never let you go," he replied matter-of-factly. "And you will never be free as long as the Organization exists. There will always be somebody watching you. Why don't you want that person to be me?"

"I don't want to depend on _you_," I replied, moving in for the kill. "I'd rather rely on Gin, Akai. He might be a killer, but I can trust him more than you."

From the expression on his face I could tell that was quite a blow for him. He only looked at me silently and murmured a small "It's your choice" when I turned and left. I walked over the street, raised my hand to say farewell without looking back to him and held my head high until I was sure that I was out of his sight.

Walking down the street towards the metro station, I wondered why he had not arrested me. He could have arrested both Akemi-nee-san and me if he had wanted to. He knew that I was one of the Organization's most important scientists. He knew about Vermouth and could guess that I was working on APTX 4869. Moreover, he could have used me as bait to catch bigger fishes. But – for a reason I could only guess – he didn't. He just watched me walking away and decided to disappear from my life as if he had never existed. In front of the metro station, I heard a sound behind me and turned round, ready to face him. However, it was just the sound of the wind blowing a plastic bag against a garbage can or "dustbin", as Akemi-nee-san, who at times refused to use American English, always called them. All of a sudden, the sight of the worn plastic bag was too much for me. I sat down on the stairs in front of the metro station, removed a long black hair from my best coat, and cried like any other fifteen-year old girl whose hopes had just been shattered by the man she loved.

x.

The sudden beginning of Prokofjew's last _Sarcasm_ – a somewhat disturbing arrangement for cello solo by the ingenious Mr. Alec Vineyard, who was misusing his talents to make fun of other people's work – interrupted my involuntary walk down memory lane. I could remember that Alec had told me about his daily practice from seven to eleven a.m., but I hadn't expected him to play something like the fifth _Sarcasm_ (which sounded awful on the cello) at a time when most people would prefer a piece by Bach. He was scratching although he never scratched, arousing my suspicion that he only played so cruelly to wake me up. The clock next to the bed said it was already eight a.m. Alec, who was an early riser, must be hungry.

In front of the bed, on the floor, there was a suitcase with the old clothes I had worn when I was shrunk for the first time, when Shinichi and I were still Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai. It seemed that Shinichi, who had kept the spare key to Professor Agasa's house since I developed my multiple personality disorder and became increasingly unpredictable, had fetched my clothes for me while I was still sleeping. Perhaps he stumbled over another corpse this morning and was already working on a new case, for he had obviously disappeared without leaving me a message.

I picked a red dress (one of my favourites) and new underwear and sneaked into the bathroom. It was bad enough that I would have to think of a way to tell Alec the truth about Shinichi and me. There was no way I could face him in this shrunken state before I had taken a shower and changed my clothes.

After the shower I sorted through the things I had brought with me from London and put the clothes, which had become too big for me, into a pile. I would lock them up in a drawer until I found a way to return to my original size. My laptop, musical scores and books, however, went back into the suitcase because I still needed them. Shuichi's blue cardigan, which my alter egos (for a reason I absolutely couldn't understand) used to carry with them whenever they travelled somewhere, went back into the suitcase as well. If my subconscious did not want to part from it, I shouldn't force myself to, I argued. On the other hand – when I looked at myself from a certain distance – I realized how ridiculous it was... trying to forget somebody whose cardigan I couldn't bring myself to lock away.

"It's your favourite, isn't it?" Shinichi remarked, closing the door behind him. He had opened the door so quietly that I had not heard him entering the room.

"Where have you been?"

"In your friend's room," he said, smiling. "I wanted him to play the _Sarcasms_ for me."

So that was the reason Alec had been scratching on his cello. He was the kind of musician who could play any piece of their repertoire in front of a big audience without making a fuss, but suffered from stage fright when they had to perform in front of a single person they respected.

"He has a very high opinion of you," I said. "Otherwise he wouldn't have played so badly. But why did you pick the _Sarcasms_? They don't even belong to a cellist's repertoire."

"It was just on a whim," Shinichi said, sitting down onto the bed. "You said you're playing them, and the title sounds intriguing. Giving the word 'sarcasm' a plural form suddenly makes it sound like something you can touch."

I smiled at him, surprised at his last remark.

"I thought the same when I heard it for the first time," I said thoughtfully.

"When was that?"

I had forgotten when it was, I lied. I did not want to talk with him about the _Sarcasms_, for the time when I had tried to find a connection between these pieces and my own life now seemed to me infinitely far away. It was after Shuichi's death, a few weeks after the downfall of the Organization, I recalled. After seeing the _**Sarcasmes/Sarcasms/Sarkasmen**_ printed in bold red letters on the cover of a CD, I looked up the exact meaning of the word "sarcasm" in _Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary_ and discovered that it was "_a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain_" or "_a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on bitter, caustic, and often ironic language that is usually directed against an individual_". It disturbed me that, in both cases, sarcasm inflicted pain on the other person while I had never intended to hurt others with my sarcastic and cynical remarks. The more sarcastic and witty a member of the Organization had been, the more he or she had impressed me when I was young. For me, sarcasm had been equivalent to strength.

Being sarcastic was not a natural character trait; and sarcasm was certainly not a gene, which could be passed from a parent to their child. It was just a bad habit and, in my case, only began as a display of wit, a mask that protected my real self from the eyes of the older members of the Organization. After the night I refused Shuichi's offer to leave the Organization, however, it became a nice tool which was always available and would always stand between others and me. In a sense, it became a part of myself.

In short, I had learned to make sarcastic remarks since my childhood and enjoyed it until I noticed that it had become my second nature and impossible to suppress.

Afterwards, being sarcastic had seemed like a curse to me. No matter how much I tried, my sarcasm would win over my friendliness. As I lacked my sister's courage to be straightforward when needed, I shrank from sentimental situations which required a straightforward, serious answer from me. When Jonathan Black, my assistant, admitted that he loved me and asked me out, I was unable to give him a nice refusal but only gave him a half-humorous, witty remark which must have seemed embarrassing and insulting in that situation. Since I was not a fool, I certainly did not try to convince myself that I was really responsible for the development of Black's psychopathic nature, which immediately turned his obsession for me into hatred of other strawberry-blonde women. Being disappointed by a woman didn't give a man the right to take such a bloody revenge; and a mentally stable man wouldn't have had any problems understanding that. However, I still felt guilty for being a prisoner of my own bad habits, unable to break them even when I wanted to, and was sorry that my sarcasm had set off Black's murderous disposition.

The sun was shining brilliantly through the window, chasing my thoughts of Black away. I had changed during the past years, I realized. Although I had returned to my shell after Shuichi had been shot from behind by a sniper of the Black Organization fifteen years ago, the years I spent with the Detective Boys had not passed without leaving its marks on me. I might never become a great pianist as my alter ego Miyano Shiho might have become, as life was now the only art I was really interested in, just as I wouldn't manage to change my stubborn cynical character within twenty-six hours as my alter ego did. But I suddenly felt deliriously happy – as happy as possible despite being stuck in a child's body.

"What a great weather," Shinichi remarked as if he could read my thoughts.

"I've missed the summer in Tokyo," I answered. "I've been in London for too long. How long exactly? Almost a year?"

After switching between alternative universes, I had lost my sense of time.

Shinichi smiled and flopped down onto the bed next to me.

"Fourteen months," he said. "If you had not come back this summer, I'd have gone to London to give you APTX. We thought you'd never return again."

"I... _she_... thought she had spent her whole life in London. But I still don't know how it worked. I had so many memories of my life in London which my mind must have made up. I even wrote letters to my 'mother' every time I was on tour, playing chamber music with a cellist and a violinist who were studying with me."

"And Alec?"

"I thought I had known him for years. But my brain must have made it up again."

"You can't have known each other for very long. Hakuba says you didn't have any friends and led a very secluded life. But he couldn't watch you for the whole time. So I guess you must have befriended Alec when Hakuba returned to Japan last spring."

"Hakuba," I sighed. "How come I can't remember seeing him?"

"Because you didn't see him," he grinned. "That's what you can expect when Hakuba tails you. But we need to change our topic: What are we going to do with your cellist now? He seems to me a rather forceful person and highly intelligent. He won't let anybody trick him very easily."

"What about telling him the truth? He would believe that something had happened to me if I suddenly disappeared over night. After everything that happened yesterday, he would probably think you had murdered me last night if I didn't show up."

"That would be an additional person who knows about APTX," Shinichi said gloomily. "Do you know that he is Vermouth's nephew? Yesterday afternoon I called Hattori and asked him to investigate Alec. This morning Hattori left me a message in my mobile phone. Alec's father was Sharon Vineyard's cousin. They even had a good relationship with each other. She visited him for a few times in Chicago and always brought his son presents. That was before Alec's parents got divorced and his mother took him with her to London."

"Alec once told me that his father had a cousin with remarkable acting skills," I murmured. "But I still think we should trust him. We don't have a better choice, anyway."

"Fine. But you will tell him the whole story. I doubt he will believe me when I tell him... And now there is still Black and his crew. I think you knew him, judging from his behaviour towards you?"

"An old admirer of mine," I said quickly. "A scientist of the Organization. He was only a member of low rank without a cocktail code name. I never thought he could kill anybody. He was not able to kill a mouse then."

"He went to prison just like the other low-ranking members. But then his roommates complained that he was mentally ill and bullied him until a psychiatrist, who became interested in the case, discovered that he had serious mental problems and had him moved to the new Suzuki mental hospital. After a while, a nurse fell in love with him and helped him to escape. He managed to take two of his friends, who he had met in the mental hospital, with him. They became his allies during the murders." His eyes darkened. "The body of the nurse was found in a small pension in the suburbs of the city yesterday night."

"And why are you still here?"

He immediately understood what I meant.

"There is nothing to investigate. The case is closed," he answered. "Mitsuhiko-kun will take care of the rest of it and conceal the connection between the case and APTX." He smiled and gave me his hand. "Let's go and scare the living daylights out of Alec. Shall we?"

x.

We did scare the life out of Alec, just as expected. He dropped his bow when he saw me standing at the door. Seeing the child-size copy of your friend grinning at you was certainly enough to bring the nerves of the strongest person on edge. After an extended breakfast and a thorough cross-examination on both sides, however, everything was happily resolved. Alec told me that we had known each other since my arrival in London and had been friends since April when we visited the same improvisation course. A few of my alter ego's recollections were true. There had been a few students who wanted to go out with me, and the director seemed to have paid me special attention. But there had been, of course, no funeral. Most of the things which happened after my last talk with the first cellist only existed in my alter ego's brain. Perhaps my mind had killed the other alter ego (Akemi, the scientist who left Tokyo for London) when my last alter ego (Shiho, Akemi's daughter) became too strong. And – if Shinichi had not given me APTX in time – I might not have been able to return. Miyano Shiho would probably have taken over my whole mind and erased my real personality for ever.

"But I must admit I still don't understand your story. If you're the same Shinichi Kudo who had brought down the Black Organization fifteen years ago... How come you still kept your old name? Somebody must have noticed that you didn't age," Alec said.

Well, he had called himself "Conan Edogawa" when he was shrunk for the first time, Shinichi explained. After taking the first permanent antidote and returning to his original size, "Conan Edogawa" went abroad to live with his parents while "Shinichi Kudo" returned to his old life. After the downfall of the Organization, however, I discovered that the antidote was killing us; and we had to take APTX again, so...

While he explained the whole story to Alec, I let my mind wander and returned to the time fifteen years ago. When I told Shinichi that we would have to take APTX again, he didn't bat an eyelid. It did not go well between Ran and him, although I didn't know the reason then. When he decided to wipe out Kudo Shinichi's identity and to continue his life as Edogawa Conan, neither his parents nor I could talk him out of it. Hence Kudo Shinichi, too, "died" officially during the downfall of the Organization. Two years later, Ran and Hakuba Saguru, a Sherlock Holmes freak just like Shinichi, got married. I had never understood how those two found each other. It seems they had met each other during one of Edogawa's cases and met again when Ran went to London for a year. They had been shuttling back and forth between Japan and England since then and seemed to be very happy with each other. In the end, nothing turned out as expected after the Black Organization went down. And I was no longer naive enough to wonder why. I just accepted the changes and moved on.

The hardest blow had been Shuichi's death. After defeating Gin and destroying the Organization with Shinichi, he had been shot from behind by a sniper who must have been a low-ranking member of the Organization. His murderer had never been found. I had spent a few days with the FBI, or rather with Shuichi, before Shinichi and I took the first permanent antidote. During those days, my old feelings for Shuichi had returned; and I had hoped that, after the downfall of the Organization, we could resurrect our old relationship, which might turn into real love. After his death, I tried to banish all the memories of him from my mind. In a way, I was more successful than I had hoped. I didn't visit his grave, in contrast to Jodie-sensei, who took care of it and once asked me whether I would come with her. I did not keep anything that could remind me of him except from my favourite cardigan, which he had given me shortly before his death when I was cold and which I didn't want to throw away. It was the only sentimental luxury I could afford without endangering my new peaceful life.

I discovered the second permanent antidote when the Detective Boys were fifteen. Life had been unusually peaceful during those three years if I didn't count the murder cases that we – or rather one special member of us – always stumbled upon. All the relationships around us suddenly made progress. Detective Takagi and Sato were married and were expecting a daughter; Ran's friend, Suzuki Sonoko, and Kyogoku Makoto had a hard time fighting against the Suzuki clan to get married, but they prevailed; and Hattori Heiji and Toyama Kazuha had just announced their engagement. Sometimes, I wondered whether Edogawa was still in love with Ran. But – although we spent even more time with each other than we did before the downfall of the Black Organization – I never talked to him about private matters anymore. He, on the other hand, had made several attempts to ask me about my past and about Shuichi. But when he noticed that I did not feel inclined to talk, he accepted my silence. Whenever I was not with him and the Detective Boys, I would work on the second antidote just to keep the memories from coming back to me.

The second antidote (which accelerated our regenerative process) turned out to be even more disastrous than the first one and forced me to develop the third at any cost, as it prevented us from aging like normal human beings. Hence, after taking APTX again, Edogawa and I stayed trapped in the bodies of fifteen year-old teenagers while the Detective Boys naturally grew. When they went to university (only Genta-kun and Ayumi-chan because Mitsuhiko-kun decided to skip university and immediately began to work for the police after finishing school), Shinichi and I felt that we couldn't keep our identities as Edogawa and Haibara for much longer. People began to notice that we did not age. We knew that what seemed like a harmless youthful appearance at the age of twenty would seem extremely disturbing at the age of forty. And I began to work even harder than I had ever worked before.

To avoid running into old school friends and acquaintances too often, we rented a three-room apartment in Shibuya (the apartment where my alter ego met Black) and continued our private studies there. I wrote all kinds of online articles to earn a bit money while Edogawa still helped the Takagi's, who knew about our situation, solve cases. Sometimes, the Detective Boys would visit us. During those university years, Ayumi-chan met Mifune, the cousin of one of Sonoko's acquaintances, a very funny mystery writer, and married him one year after their first meeting. Genta-kun fell in love with Maria, the girl who went to elementary school with us, after meeting her again on a birthday party after university. But it seemed he felt self-conscious about being overweight, as he had been trying to lose weight during the past two years and had not dared to ask her out yet.

Mitsuhiko-kun, on the other hand, had concentrated on his job and was making quite a career. Although his intellectual streak was often more of a hindrance than help when it came to solving cases (he had to pull himself together not to get lost in the labyrinth of his complicated theories when the case was, in reality, simple), he was on his way toward becoming one of the best brains in the police forces. When Genta-kun and Ayumi-chan finished their studies and decided to join him, they formed a small but effective group which Megure-keibu teasingly called "The Three Musketeers".

At this time, Edogawa Conan disappeared (because Shinichi was tired of disguising himself as a twenty-three year old when he barely looked sixteen) and Kudo Shinichi No. 2 was born. This Shinichi was an orphaned young man – the son of a chemist and a secret agent who died during the downfall of the Black Organization – who looked so much like "the late highschool detective Kudo Shinichi" that Kudo's parents Kudo Yusaku and Kudo Yukiko adopted him and gave him the name of his son. I was very skeptical at the beginning. But the less believable the story sounded, the more the reporters would buy it, Shinichi had said: Their reasoning would be that if Kudo Yusaku, that great mystery writer, and the great actress Kudo Yukiko wanted to make up a story, they would have thought of something more believable. Nobody could think of a drug which prevented people from aging, anyway. Hence the impossible-sounding story – which would make a small gem for the gossip column – must be true. Now that I was thinking about it, I wondered what would have happened if my alter ego could have investigated the story of Kudo's life before she met him in Tokyo.

After Kudo accidentally told a reporter that our apartment once belonged to his father (Kudo Yusaku had once rented the apartment and lived there for a few months) and that it was the reason he had decided to move in with Haibara Ai, who had stayed in her apartment after "Edogawa Conan" had left Japan for the US, the reporters came to the inescapable conclusion that the non-existent secret agent who was supposed to be Kudo Number Two's father had lived there. Luckily, nobody had cared enough to investigate into this matter. When the reporter of the previous night asked Kudo whether his apartment in Shibuya had belonged to his father, who had been shot, he meant the invented secret agent, not Kudo Yusaku.

The nameplate matter, which had seemed so mysterious to my alter ego, was not hard to explain either. The nameplate on our apartment had shown _"Haibara Ai/ Kudo Shinichi" _in Kanji, with the Latin transcription of our names engraved in tiny letters underneath the Kanji, which was the reason Alec, who had been sitting on the street, couldn't read it. Shinichi must have told one of the Detective Boys (Mitsuhiko-kun was the best choice) to remove the nameplate because he knew that he wouldn't be able to explain to Alec and me why our names were engraved on it. I could not imagine what would have happened if Alec had paid attention to the names on the postboxes when he was running around the house or if Shinichi had forgotten to have the nameplate removed…

Eight years after creating the second antidote, I finished the third antidote and – despite Shinichi's protests – decided to test it on myself before I gave it to him.

"So you're Kudo Number Two," Alec said. "What are you going to do in ten years? Invent Kudo Number Three or Edogawa Number Two?"

"I suppose we'll have to leave Tokyo and begin a new life after that," Shinichi shrugged. "But I still hope Ai will find the real antidote until then."

"I can adopt you," Alec beamed, ruffling my hair just as Shinichi did the previous night. They had lost their respect for me completely since I had been shrunk. "Or I can make you my cousin, which would be even better."

"Not a bad idea," Shinichi remarked. "But she can be my cousin as long as we stay in Japan. How would you like to be called, Ai?"

"I don't know," I said. "As long as it's not something like 'Ai Miyano' or 'Shiho Haibara', I'd take almost any name you give me."

"What about keeping Ai Haibara?" Shinichi suggested. "Nobody would think that you're the same Ai Haibara who went to school with Conan. You're too young, and-"

Both Alec and I groaned in response.

x.

In the end, we agreed on "Shiho Miyano". In Tokyo, nobody would remember Miyano Shiho, as I had spent most of my time as "Sherry" in the laboratories of the Black Organization when I was young. Alec spent the rest of the holiday at Shinichi's house and did not return to London before September (when he absolutely had to because the new semester at the conservatoire began). When the Professor, Ran and Hakuba came to visit us (their children had stayed in Osaka with Hattori) and we introduced Alec to them, we made another curious discovery which threw Shinichi and me off balance. Alec and Hakuba turned out to be related to each other, for they discovered that they had the same distant relative (a cousin who had been Hakuba's childhood friend and who had helped raise Alec when his parents were busy making each other's life a living hell). Hence Hakuba must be Sharon Vineyard's nephew, too, which seemed to me a particularly scary thought.

I took the second antidote again and did not experience any side effects afterwards. The regenerative process of my cells had been accelerated just as expected, which did have its advantages. Living with Shinichi and following him to all his cases had been a dangerous undertaking. But, as I knew that neither of us could die, I didn't need to worry about our safety too much. Sometimes, when I see how fast the Professor, who has come back to Beika since my return, is aging and losing his former zest for adventures, I have to prevent myself from mixing APTX and the second antidote into his tea. Eternity, no matter how pleasant it seems at the beginning, will become a curse after a while. I keep telling myself that, and hope I won't shrink the Professor in a sentimental fit some day.

Just like Ran and Hakuba, Hattori and Kazuha often visit us and – just like Ran, unlike Hakuba! – leave all kinds of sundry articles in Shinichi's vast entrance room when they hurry home. Their relationship is – in contrast to the peaceful relationship between Ran and her husband – still a stormy one, with many ups and downs. Like Shinichi's parents, they are constantly arguing about little things. Kazuha leaves her husband about three times a year to go back to her father and returns every time after a week under the pretence of feeling guilty for leaving the mystery-obsessed idiot starving to death by himself. (Just like Shinichi, Hattori has never learned to cook.)

The (still secret) relationship between Shinichi and me goes well, although I still wonder what it exactly is. When Shinichi and I were still inexperienced with the new situation, we walked hand in hand through the streets and then blanched at the remarks of people whose observation was good enough to distinguish between a brotherly love and a romantic – though completely platonic – love affair which has not made any progress over the years. Now we know to play our roles in public very well, he slipping with ease into the role of the protective older cousin and I giving a convincing performance of the young girl who has lost her parents and is now completely depended on his care. Besides I refused to go to school again; and, to my relief, nobody seemed to care. Privately, Shinichi and I have stayed friends and, in a sense, partners in crime, which is often too little and sometimes for much for both of us, especially when his reckless character worries and irritates me. But there are moments when I am completely content and happy and believe that he feels the same.

I have not found the antidote yet and – though I try not to think about it – often wonder whether I ever will. In a sense, I had developed the perfect supplements to APTX 4869 when I created Antidote Number Two and Number Three. Neither Shinichi nor I can grow or die. On the other hand, we had never enjoyed better health. And Alec, who has had to cancel a few concerts because he has become very susceptible to infections and common illnesses since he began his career as a touring cello soloist three years ago, has more than once begged me to give him APTX 4869 and the immortality-antidote. He would love to spend an eternity playing cello, he told me every time. And then I would ask myself whether I should tell him that his auntie, the beautiful famous actress who escaped from jail last year, might still be cursing my parents and me for having developed APTX 4869. She is the only person in the world on whom the imperfect APTX has had the same effect as the Antidote Number Two. She cannot age, cannot die, and will spend an eternity drifting through life and fighting against her everlasting boredom.

Shinichi has just come home and is storming into the kitchen where I am standing, making omelettes for breakfast.

"Did they wake you up in the night again?" I ask, grinning at his disheveled appearance, his reddened cheeks and glowing eyes.

"No. I went out on my own... I had a few suspicions yesterday and..." He shakes his head, flops into a chair and laughs. "Guess who is lodging in the Grande Suzuki at the moment, Shiho."

"Alec?"

"No, but another Vineyard."

I almost let the egg in my hand fall onto the floor.

"But you don't need to worry," Shinichi adds quickly. "She doesn't intend to murder anyone, at least not at the moment."

"Have you called the police?" I ask. The thought of Vermouth living in Beika absolutely does not appeal to me. "And how on earth has she managed to pay that hotel?" As always, my thoughts get practical when I feel trapped.

"She is a survival genius. Paying the Grande Suzuki shouldn't be hard for her. No, I haven't reported her to the police. She is our ally at the moment. Let's forget past grudges and move on."

Shinichi and she have called a truce, he tells me. She will allow me to take a sample of her blood to study the unknown effects of APTX 4869. If it helps me to create the ultimate antidote, we will give her a pill of it. And all of us can start our lives anew afterwards, struggling to organize our limited time as normal people do.

"That would be wonderful," I remark thoughtfully. "Too good to be true."

"Almost nothing is too good to be true," he replies with a smile, leaning comfortably back in his chair and closing his eyes because the light from the window is blinding him. For a moment, we are only Kudo Shinichi and Miyano Shiho again, without the shadows of the past and the worries of the future troubling us. Life has taken enough unexpected turns to prove to me that, just like blows of fate, strokes of luck do happen. And perhaps, stripped of my mistrust and skepticism, I will learn to deal with them like Shinichi does, enjoying my life, taking whatever the future holds in store for me without complaining and being prepared to grasp the chance when fortune smiles upon us.

**The End**

**x.**

**Author's Notes:** Finally I've completed a multi-chaptered story which I'm not going to rewrite again. (I think a few people will sigh in relief now.) "Sarcasms" began as an experiment and was not supposed to be so long (only six chapters for the five _Sarcasms_ and one Epilogue). But, as always, I failed to foresee how many words I would need to tell a story.

Despite the serious-sounding title, "Sarcasms" is, just like most of my stories, written tongue-in-cheek. It is not supposed to be a speculation of what might happen at the end of the original manga and does not intend to be an essay supporting Conan-Ai or Shinichi-Shiho. I'm sure that most of the things that happened in this story will never happen in the original DC universe. That's why I wrote this story.

I'm going to illustrate the story some day, but not very soon, as I don't have much time and am concentrating on ENCOUNTER in VENICE now. If you're interested, you can find everything on FS' Suitcase/my Livejournal (please look for the link on my profile), Author's Notes, explanations, illustrations (when I've finished them). I am not allowed to post those things on this site.

Thanks very much to everybody who has managed to get through the twelve chapters, especially to readers who have reviewed and those who have pointed out typos and grammar mistakes in the story. Although I've reread it many times and had sent it to Rae, who betaed it, we might have overlooked mistakes which seem obvious to you. I'll be thankful if you point it out so that I can edit it. And if you still have questions after reading the plot of the story, you can ask me in your review, a PM or leave me a comment on Livejournal (I do accept anonymous comments on Livejournal and can answer to them, whereas I cannot answer to anonymous reviews on this site.)


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